[flashrom] Blank check

[Carl-Daniel Hailfinger]

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

-- 
http://www.hailfinger.org/