Hi folks,
people often ask me about a potential next release and what is holding me back. Long story short, I knew about some bad things in our master branch that make a release impossible and I was very much afraid that there could be more that I don't know about.
I've been scrolling through the commit log from v1.1 (the last release I was involved) to today's master. Some of the things I found are simple like something missing for a flash chip entry. But most of it are things I'd rather not have on a release branch. And the list turned out to be much longer than I expected. OTOH, I didn't find issues of the worst kind I expected.
Not sure how to go on from here. As this is a lot to do, I suggest that we freeze the master branch for everything that is neither a fix nor on the list (or a similar case that I missed). I noted sometimes that we could just drop the code from a release branch. If we'd decide to do that, we'd also need a plan how to stop the rot on the master branch.
Below are my raw notes, I don't have the time to write things up nicely. I noted the commit hash where things began, but tried to take the cur- rent state into account. For instance, when it's about a new programmer driver, I was looking at the file, not the initial patch.
Cheers, Nico
Recommended clean-ups and investigations before v1.3 ====================================================
* cb973683 Added partial meson support which confuses package main- tainers. Should we remove it from or disable CLI building on release branches?
* 71b706f5 Adds some libflashrom APIs with questionable design, buggy implementation and no visible user. Would be easiest to drop and add back when somebody needs it. Open comment. Partially fixed up.
* 86fc9cf7 Open comment. Partially fixed up.
* 05c629be Looks incomplete, flash would be fully erased with programmers that lack native 4BA command support.
* ad08aef6 Undocumented programmer. disable? drop from realease branch?
* 703de983 Added `spireadmode` param to sb600spi. (How) does it work?
* 13a2ef6c Added `lspcon_i2c_spi`. Too generic name: LSPCon is a concept but driver seems to be about a specific vendor/chip. No pro- bing just starts to write to hardcoded addresses. WP code contains magic numbers, board specific? Implements `spi_ master` but contains hard-coded SPI opcodes. Not documented? disable? drop from release branch?
* d97f87b0 Added `realtek_mst_i2c_spi`. No probing, starts by toggling a GPIO. Are GPIO settings board specific? Timeout checks seem to have regressed since original commit. Not documented? Changes clock settings, is this board specific? Implements `spi_master` with special cases in an opcode LUT, doesn't bail out on unknown codes. Falls back on unaligned reads/ writes, were these paths tested? Fixups suggest that the original code wasn't properly tested, was it by now? disable? drop from release branch?
* be4682dc Might miss some block erasers.
* f82dd300 Might miss some block erasers.
* a2dc4f7f It seems `clear_spi_id_cache()` is never called. Probably, should be before probing.
* 3149822c Added variable size in `dummy_programmer`. Didn't look at it right now, but I remember it caused a lot of trouble. Probably not fully fixed up yet.
* cb9f3cd0 Possible division by zero.
* ca2e3bce Fixed some libpci usage. IIRC, there are many more similar cases that might need a fix now that libpci is more strict.
* 0386aa17 sb600spi refactoring. Looks like it dropped an error message from many error paths.
* f745d0e6, adbae0e2 Added infrastructure for S25F chips. Code style looks a bit outdated. Probably needs upstream review.
* 8fa792fb Added chips with oddities and w/o reasoning, e.g: .total_size = 16384, /* This is just half the size.... */ Complete patch needs review.
* 855d6b6f Added Ryzen support to sb600spi. API violations. Stalled other cleanup work. Soft bricks machines with >16MiB flash. Patches on Gerrit. drop from release branch?
* 32f4cb4f Looks like copy-pasta from Winbond chips. Might miss some block erasers. Missing 4BA_WRITE is probably wrong.
* 45d50a10 Added support code for per-region file arguments. Review was interrupted, IIRC. Rebase was borked shortly before merge. Work never finished.
* d4063bf3 Missed to update the manpage. Literal `-` shouldn't be in `<>`.
* ce983bcc Missed to update the manpage. Filters only spaces when converting region names to file names.
* 51e1d0e4 Still selects the wrong chipset, IIRC.
* e98b2d11 Review never really started. See comments on Gerrit.
Backport candidates ===================
* 4ca575dc usbdev: Only match requested USB devices
* 8bbb7648 spi95: Check for success before using send_command's returned data
* b07c53d7 spi25: Debug flashrom crash when Write Protect is ON Looks like this covers up a general problem with flash-chip entries. Why would we know how to disable block protection if we don't know how to report it? Should probably be added to self checks.
* 51261541 it87spi.c: Prevent use-after-free bug
* da0825f0 chipset_enable.c: check return value from rphysmap() call
* 705212da chipset_enable.c: Validate physmap() return rcrb value
* b76d2810 dediprog: Fix segmentation fault on no device found
* 1a21cc70 helpers.c: Fix undefined behavior in strndup()
* a2f2f3f5 linux_mtd: Disable buffering on the mtd device
* ab623c65 jlink_spi: Reduce transfer size
* Many fixes in dummy_flasher, not sure if they were applicable earlier.
* aedfb7eb flashrom.8: add missing entry for `--flash-contents`
* 89c73b5a linux_mtd: check ioctl() return value properly