Hi Helge,
On 06.08.2010 15:29, Wagner, Helge (GE Intelligent Platforms) wrote:
I am not sure if this was discussed before, but i would suggest to skip programming blocks/areas which should be programmed to the erased state. E.g. if half of the input file consists of 0xFF areas, we could half the programming time.
And on chips where read is much faster than erase (e.g. SST 25VF...) we can speed up erasing if we do a read before erase and only erase that blocks that are not already in the erased state.
Fully agreed. In fact, I am working on a patch which will do exactly that. Right now the whole flashrom infrastructure is oriented to erase-in-bulk/write-in-bulk, but over the last few weeks a few patches have been merged which will allow us to perform partial writes and partial erases on an as-needed basis. Two patches for this sort of operation are still unmerged because we want to release the current well-tested state of flashrom as 0.9.3 first, and then change the internal interfaces in one go and give the codebase a few weeks to stabilize.
Regards, Carl-Daniel