On Mon, 15 Sep 2008 14:39:29 -0700, ebiederm@xmission.com (Eric W. Biederman) wrote:
Carl-Daniel Hailfinger c-d.hailfinger.devel.2006@gmx.net writes:
On 15.09.2008 22:32, Joseph Smith wrote:
On Mon, 15 Sep 2008 14:17:11 -0500, Alex Mauer hawke@hawkesnest.net wrote:
Carl-Daniel Hailfinger wrote:
Some legacy BIOSes seem to use that method. Stuffing a complete
flashrom
binary there would be overkill, though.
He was talking about turning flashrom into a library. I guess you'd have to ask him about the details though.
Well like I said earlier. Why not setup a small jffs2 filesystem in
flash
to host filo.conf?
Code complexity and minimum size of jffs2 (5*eraseblocksize (64 kByte minimum) according to some tests) are the big problems here. Even if the code complexity was kept local, allocating 320 kByte of flash for filo.conf would be a showstopper. You may be able to get size requirements down with hacks and newer jffs2.
Well it looked to me when I last looked that 2 flash blocks that you alternated writing to for BIOS config uses would probably be a good idea.
In addition as I recall a lot of SST flash parts had 4K erase blocks. And some others had a few small erase blocks. So you can dramatically get the erase size down.
The only downside is that you don't get as many erases as if you had done wear leveling across the entire device. But for something you write infrequently it would not be a big deal.
Thanks for the input Eric, this sounds promising :-)