Hi Ruben,
On 11.01.2016 14:58, R. Diez wrote:
I am trying to use flashrom with a fast generic FTDI FT2232H adapter as an SPI Flash programmer in a small production line.
The SPI Flash chip can hold 8 MiB of data, but we are only using the first 512 KiB of it.
I found flashrom to be surprisingly slow. I started digging and the step "Reading old flash chip contents..." is taking minutes.
If you can switch your production line to use flashrom on a Raspberry Pi or a Beaglebone Black for SPI programming with the SPI pins on those boards, reading a flash chip will only take seconds and writes will be really fast as well because the per-command latency is almost zero. With a SPI frequency of 8 MHz and a flash chip size of 8 MiB, reading the whole chip on a RPi or BBB takes roughly 9 seconds (to be precise, 8388608/256*(4+256)*8/8000000 seconds). For FT2232 based programmers, you get a lot of USB overhead (mostly latency) which makes reading slow, but writing is even worse.
Regards, Carl-Daniel