On Thu, Jan 30, 2014 at 6:21 AM, The Gluglug <info@gluglug.org.uk> wrote:

Thanks. I'll take a look.

As far as syntax is concerned it would not yield much benefit.
I considered that this would be a bit more "standard" (everything is a file mentality).

Flashrom's syntax is kind of a gift and a curse. It's not the simplest, nor is it the worst, but the getopt approach provides a huge amount of flexibility when dealing with specific chips, chispets, external programmers (Bus Pirate, Dediprog, etc), etc. which is pretty important to flashrom.

We've also added a few of our own goodies in the chromium.org branch for things like controlling write-protection, layout enhancements to vastly speed up reading/writing desired portions, simplifying programmer syntax for better uniformity, etc. Long story short, flashrom is useful for much more than simply reading/writing ROMs and flexible syntax is a big help.

It may be useful to port support for particular chips and chispets into the kernel so that flashrom may use /dev/spi (which is already supported) and MTD also benefits those who prefer the dd syntax. This is already pretty common on non-x86 systems, but for whatever reason it seems there has been very little interest in making that happen in the x86 world.

/my $0.02

On 30/01/14 14:20, Stefan Tauner wrote:

On Thu, 30 Jan 2014 13:27:39 +0000
The Gluglug <info@gluglug.org.uk> wrote:

Basically,

/dev/spi
This would be your flash chip, enumerated using flashrom.

flashrom -r equivalent:
dd if=/dev/spi of=dump.rom

flashrom -w eqivalent:
dd if=coreboot.rom of=/dev/spi

Where SPI is the internal SPI chip on your motherboard.
If (using flashrom as the backend) the linux kernel supports your flash
chip, you could just use dd.

What does the community think of this idea?

IMHO we are the wrong guys to ask this actually, and I predict the Linux
guys to be not very ambiguous (understatement) about it.
From flashrom's perspective it does not make too much sense because we
have to implement it anyway (for all other OSes).
The main question for me is: what would you gain? dd syntax isnt really
that much more comfortable than ours IMO :)

PS: There are probably more answers to this or similar questions in the
mailing list archive...

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David Hendricks (dhendrix)
Systems Software Engineer, Google Inc.