[flashrom] Dediprog programming is slow

Carl-Daniel Hailfinger c-d.hailfinger.devel.2006 at gmx.net
Sat Mar 10 11:54:33 CET 2012


Hi Jeff,

Am 10.03.2012 05:52 schrieb jeff at linuxwest.com:
> Thank you for the impressive work in this app!

Glad to hear it works for you.


> This is only my first time using Flashrom to write the bios file so I don't know 
> what is considered normal. The software provided by Dediprog writes the same 
> file in much less time it takes Flashrom to do it. I wonder if that's because 
> Flashrom will first erase the chip and then "In the process the chip is also 
> read several times"?

No, it's because your flashrom version does not have the dediprog write
speedup. You need at least 0.9.4-r1477 for a reasonable write speed (it
won't help for all flash chips, but a majority of them).


> Is it possible to bypass the erasing and in-memory backup operations to save 
> time? The slowness is with the "--noverify" option enabled.

--noverify will save maybe 10 seconds if you're lucky. The slow write
speed is caused by an incomplete dediprog driver in v0.9.4-r1395.


> If I flash with the same image, it is really fast. Perhaps that is expected. But 
> notice in my attachment, it's taking 20 mins to flash 8M.

You should get almost native speed (like the Windows tool from Dediprog)
with latest flashrom unless your flash chip uses the AAI or write_1
methods. We're working to provide native speed for all SPI flash chips,
but it depends on testers.


> Also, something important I really want to know is if it is possible to run more 
> than one instance of flashrom at the same time (two dediprogs)?

Do you own multiple Dediprogs? If yes, it would be very interesting to
know how the Windows Dediprog tool differentiates between the two, and
what flashrom does if it sees two Dediprogs (it will probably just
ignore the second one). I'm willing to add support for concurrent
flashrom instances (one per programmer) to the Dediprog driver if you're
willing to test.

Regards,
Carl-Daniel

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





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