Thanks Carl-Daniel

I have a couple of these VL805 cards to test with - I don't have a Pi but your code should work if I can add the FM25Q04
Not too worried about bricking - cheap on Amazon. From Ubuntuforms it sounds like you can recover pretty easily from erased firmware using the windows based VIA programmer.

do you have a tarball/zip/git of your build?

thanks, again, 

John Paul

Link to the datasheet:


For the Windows tool my guess is to add this to the firmware updaters spiflash.ini  but won't be able to test for a couple of days.
The commands seem to be pretty standard and match the datasheet.
I'm not sure about the ClockRate - most flash ships are set to 32 but not all.
Page size 0x100 (256) is used by almost all but exceptions are MX25L5121E (0x20)  AT25F512A(0x80), and W25X10BV(0x10)
I haven't looked up all the chips but some of them had a page size of 0x100 but the firmware tool sets a smaller value.
e.g. W25X10BV datasheet says its page size is 0x100 but the tool sets it to 0x10 - maybe there's reasons to program with smaller pages?


[FM25Q04]
FlashID=A112
ReadID=9F
WriteEnable=06
WriteStatus=01
ChipErase=C7
ReadData=03
ReadStatus=05
PageProgram=02
ClockRate=32   
PageSize=100




On Tue, Feb 2, 2021 at 2:53 PM Carl-Daniel Hailfinger <c-d.hailfinger.devel.2006@gmx.net> wrote:
Hi John Paul,

Am 02.02.21 um 20:12 schrieb John Paul Morrison:
> I'm just starting to look at fashrom to see how to read/update SPI
> flash on a PCIe card
>
> lspci -d 1106:3483
> 01:00.0 USB controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VL805 USB 3.0 Host
> Controller (rev 01)
>
> There isn't much from Via but the chipset is used in the Raspberry Pi
> 4 and the Pi firmware provides a flash tool vl805 (no source code of
> course!)

I have a working flashrom driver for that host controller, but I need
testers. Back when I wrote the driver at the end of 2019 I didn't even
have a Raspberry Pi 4 and was just reverse engineering the behaviour
from traces with some help from clever on IRC.


> I can run it on Intel with Qemu - unfortunately for me the tool is
> hard coded for a different SPI flash chip (and in later Pi hardware
> seems to have been moved/removed)
>
> Inspecting the board and related datasheets (VL800) the chipset has an
> SPI interface for firmware, and it can be used for PCI BIOS
> apparently.  The actual SPI chip varies from board to board - mine is
> FM25Q04 from the data sheet ID=A112. Raspberry Pi seems to use
> W25X10BV  based on the ID EF10
>
> Are there any simple examples of accessing SPI on PCIe cards?
>
> sorry for the long post - I've included a bit  more info on what I
> could find on the chip

Thanks.

I really should update the VL805 patch against current flashrom and
submit it.

>
> thanks
>
> John Paul

Regards,
Carl-Daniel


> Other info on the chip:
>
> I can  read the firmware version easily:
>
> sudo lspci -d 1106:3483 -xxx | awk '/^50:/ { print "VL805 FW version:
> " $5 $4 $3 $2 }'
>
> I can use strace to see what vl805 doing - I can make out some SPI
> commands - here it reads the SPI flash chip ID:
> openat(AT_FDCWD, "/sys/bus/pci/devices/0000:01:00.0/config", O_RDWR) = 4
> (bunch of reads/writes)
> pread64(4, "\22\241\22\241", 4, 124)    = 4                          
> write(1, "R Rx_REG0 a112a112\n", 19)    = 19
>
>
> sudo ~/vl805/vl805 -d
> VL805 FW version: 00013600
> W CHIP_SEL 00000001
> R PCI_WB_EN ffffffff
> W PCI_WB_EN ffffff01
> R STOP_POLLING 00000001
> W STOP_POLLING 00000001
> W CTRL_REG 000005a0
> W CLK_DIV 0000000a
> W CHIP_SEL 00000000
> W Tx_REG0 90000000
> W CTRL_REG 000005c0
> R Rx_REG0 a112a112
> W CHIP_SEL 00000001
> * flash ID mismatch - found a112, expected 0000ef10
>
> I was able to find a Windows based firmware updater which supports
> about 20 different SPI chips - people have reported adding new
> chipsets, looks like I have to add mine as well. 
> The flash tool runs under wine but it can't read anything - will have
> to find a fix or run in a vm.
>
>
> Via SpiFlash.ini:
> [MX25L512]
> FlashID=C22010
> ReadID=9F
> WriteEnable=06
> WriteStatus=01
> ChipErase=60
> ReadData=03
> ReadStatus=05
> PageProgram=02
> ClockRate=32
> PageSize=100
>
> Raspberry Pi 4 ?
> [W25X10BV]
> FlashID=EF10
> ReadID=90000000
> WriteEnable=06
> WriteStatus=01
> ChipErase=C7
> ReadData=03
> ReadStatus=05
> PageProgram=02
> ClockRate=32
> PageSize=10