Hi all,
I'm the maintainer of fwupd, which is a daemon for doing firmware updates in Linux. Using fwupd about 200,000 people update firmware every month. At the moment I have an out-of-tree patch to use the flashrom CLI for updating coreboot on Purism laptops, which exec's a flashrom binary with the correct arguments and then screen scrapes the output. This is less than ideal. I saw the appearance of a libflashrom in the staging branch and got very excited. I'm assuming the long term goal here is to install a shared with stable API/ABI library and a pkg-config file. If so, please keep reading.
One thing that is really important for fwupd is progress completion; as flashing the firmware is an inherently scary thing to do users do like to see a progress bar move from 0% to 100% in a gradual way as it's very re-assuring. This is even more important for the GUI, where people that just see a spinner don't know if the process is going to take 10 seconds, or 10 minutes.
Would it be possible to have a process callback for flashrom_image_read(), flashrom_image_write() and flashrom_image_verify()? It'd need to have some kind of callback userdata too, for instance:
int flashrom_image_verify(struct flashrom_flashctx *, const void *buffer, size_t buffer_len, flashrom_progress_callback callback_fn, void *callback_user_data);
and also:
typedef void(flashrom_progress_callback)(uint64 completed, unit64 total, void *user_data)
I'm not familiar at all with flashrom internals, but could try to produce a patch if required -- although to propagate the progress through operations would mean patching a lot of chip->read() callbacks which probably requires a more experienced hand. Ideas welcome, thanks.
Richard.
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Richard Hughes