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?
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...
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).
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...
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...
flashrom mailing list flashrom@flashrom.org http://www.flashrom.org/mailman/listinfo/flashrom
On Thu, Jan 30, 2014 at 01:27:39PM +0000, The Gluglug 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?
Where would you stick the: * chipset enables * board enables
Luc Verhaegen.
On Thu, 2014-01-30 at 15:22 +0100, Luc Verhaegen wrote:
Where would you stick the:
- chipset enables
- board enables
In drivers/mtd/maps/ alongside the existing ones?
On Thu, Jan 30, 2014 at 02:56:59PM +0000, David Woodhouse wrote:
On Thu, 2014-01-30 at 15:22 +0100, Luc Verhaegen wrote:
Where would you stick the:
- chipset enables
- board enables
In drivers/mtd/maps/ alongside the existing ones?
I can see this working out for chipset enables, but never for board enables.
Heh, it used to be a dozen or so when i last did any flashrom work. Now it's 150 already. Quite a change in 4 years:
http://tracker.coreboot.org/trac/flashrom/browser/trunk/board_enable.c
Luc Verhaegen.
On Thu, 2014-01-30 at 13:27 +0000, The Gluglug 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?
For some chips/chipsets it already works. They would be MTD devices. And you can then use a flash file system on (part of) them, if they're big enough, etc.
Am 30.01.2014 15:43 schrieb David Woodhouse:
On Thu, 2014-01-30 at 13:27 +0000, The Gluglug wrote:
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?
For some chips/chipsets it already works. They would be MTD devices. And you can then use a flash file system on (part of) them, if they're big enough, etc.
The Linux MTD subsystem is really nice, but its use case (both target hardware and desired usage) differs from what flashrom does. Both ways of handling flash chips fit their own niche well. In theory you could extend Linux MTD to grow more flashrom-like functions, and in theory you could extend flashrom to grow more Linux MTD-like functions, but the result would not be pretty.
flashrom supports programmers/controllers/interfaces which are too weird (ICH hardware sequencing), too abstract (Dediprog SF*) and/or too complex (FT*232 SPI) to be shoved into the Linux kernel. And even if we'd be able to get all that stuff merged into the official Linux kernel, users would have to upgrade the kernel every time a new flash chip is released. That's a no-go for pretty much any installation I know. Heck, you'd be completely stranded trying to replace the kernel on a Linux live CD. Then there's the portability aspect. Writing kernel code portable between different operating systems may be somewhat feasible, but I've seen the wrapper layers for cross-platform network drivers (something which is more standardized than the programmers flashrom has to deal with) and they will make you want to wash your eyes with bleach.
TL; DR: Not going to happen. Sorry.
Regards, Carl-Daniel
Wouldn't this basically be the equivalent of the mtd subsystem?
On 1/30/2014 8:27 AM, The Gluglug 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?
flashrom mailing list flashrom@flashrom.org http://www.flashrom.org/mailman/listinfo/flashrom
-
Brian Rak -
Carl-Daniel Hailfinger -
David Hendricks -
David Woodhouse -
Luc Verhaegen -
Stefan Tauner -
The Gluglug