[LinuxBIOS] Flashrom --layout fails badly

[Stefan Reinauer]

* Jeremy Jackson <jerj at coplanar.net> [070508 21:11]:
> I'm also curious about the incrementing addresses it displays.  When
> using a layout file, I'd expect it to skip certain addresses, or start a
> new line when starting/stopping each range, perhaps like
 
Very true. That part is quite a bit fake in flashrom. It reads the image
from disk, reads the "skipped" areas from the flash chip into the image
and then flashes the complete image. 

It would be easy to fix, given a bit of time: The only tested path is
erasing all of the chip and then rewriting it. It would be much better
to respect the flash hardware sectors/blocks here. The changes required
to the code are mostly adding/fixing block erase functions for all
supported chips.

The nasty part is testing: All the flash devices would require
retesting with full and partial images.

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