Flashrom has really nice generic routines like probe_jedec. They work perfectly as long as flashrom does not have to care about the bus protocol it should use to talk to the chip. Even current external flashers (nic3com, satasii) work fine because flashrom does not have to care about the bus protocol there either. However, any external flasher supporting multiple bus protocols (and such flashers are being worked on) really wants to know which protocol to use. Unfortunately, chip_read* and chip_write* don't know about the bus protocol.
If you're referring to my work, yes the protocol is designed so to be able to support many bustypes, but i have no real hardware for anything else than parallel.
And then, i realized a missing feature in my protocol, it cannot tell the flasher of the bustype to be used. It's only an optional command away though.
Adding struct flashchip * as parameter to chip_read* and chip_write* would solve the issue quite nicely and improve our abstraction at the same time. Of course, this means every function calling chip_read* and chip_write* has to pass struct flashchip * to them. Ergo, we need struct flashchip * as parameter in the whole call chain.
An alternative would be using global variables for current flash chip properties, but that is madness during probe where we want to check for multiple chips.
I think that having a simple global current_flashchip pointer would be simpler in many ways: - it would only need a single assign to operation to the loop at probe_flash to support it - it wouldnt be necessary to pass unnecessary parameters to chip_* functions ( most dont need this info - atleast atm ;P ), making for a smaller binary