[flashrom] arm, chromebook and pci.h

[bruce m beach]

Hello Stefan

Thanks for your message. It helped clarify a lot of  things, one
of them which might surprise you. I think I'll stick with
your version of flashrom. I think it is better, which you might
see as I explain some things.

>ARM systems can have PCI busses and the vanilla flashrom
>Makefile requires respective libraries on default. This is
>because traditionally flashrom was an x86 BIOS flashrom only.

Ok. Just a quirk on my behalf. Like a whole lot of people I have
been living an breathing PC's ever since IBM came along and
totaly changed everything in the small computer world so the PCI
is somewhat imbedded in me. One day after I bought the
Cromebooki, 3 months ago, I was trying to get the PCIutils to
work until it finally dawned on me, "There is no PCI bus on this
thing!", so I removed them so that things would fail if something
ever tried to reference them. I reinstalled them, built flashrom
whith no problems and since I know that the flash in question is
on a SPI bus tried every variation(with -VVV) that I dared. (no writes yet)

Here are some straightforward results

1-----------------------------------------
)flashrom -p linux_spi:dev=/dev/spidev1.0
flashrom v0.9.7-r1711 on Linux 3.4.0 (armv7l)
flashrom is free software, get the source code at
http://www.flashrom.org

Calibrating delay loop... OK.
Found Winbond flash chip "W25Q32.W" (4096 kB, SPI) on linux_spi.
No operations were specified.
)

2-----------------------------------------
)flashrom -r original_flash -p linux_spi:dev=/dev/spidev1.0
flashrom v0.9.7-r1711 on Linux 3.4.0 (armv7l)
flashrom is free software, get the source code at
http://www.flashrom.org

Calibrating delay loop... OK.
Found Winbond flash chip "W25Q32.W" (4096 kB, SPI) on linux_spi.
Block protection could not be disabled!
Reading flash... done.
)
3-----------------------------------------
)flashrom -v original_flash -p linux_spi:dev=/dev/spidev1.0
flashrom v0.9.7-r1711 on Linux 3.4.0 (armv7l)
flashrom is free software, get the source code at
http://www.flashrom.org

Calibrating delay loop... OK.
Found Winbond flash chip "W25Q32.W" (4096 kB, SPI) on linux_spi.
Block protection could not be disabled!
Reading old flash chip contents... done.
Verifying flash... VERIFIED.
)

>> Is the Chromebook not supported by this version of flashrom
>That's exactly the case... google has forked flashrom in
>chromiumos and I strongly recommend using their version at the
>moment on those systems.

I'm aware of the chromiumos fork and spent an afternoon reading
everything I could and decided flashrom was what I wanted (as
apposed to flashrom_chrome say). I run a totally stock linux
system. It is not an Ubuntu, debian or anything system. All the
packages including yours I build out of the box with no
modifications and no reference at all to the fact that this is an
arm system. It is completely transparent. It is reasonable expect
that even the low level operations work properly. It is all taken
care of by the kernel. Now far as getting flashrom_chrome, I
don't have it. I have long since blown chrome away (I store my
source files where it used to be) and don't want anything to do
with it. (my hostname is system_zinc) Furthermore I don't think I
could even build it on this machine without a great deal of work.

I have been thinking about this day and night because I really
need to flash that rom, and at some point something clicked in my
mind and said "it will work". I know that feeling.  I need to do
more testing and checking and if you have suggestions they can be
tried, the end result being that you could add this machine, at
least for the SPI bus to your list of things known to work.
Notice, by the way, the flash is write protected and it will be
quite some time before I get around to removing it and trying to
write to it. If I toast the machine I can

1. Try to fix it with an external programmer.
2. Use the machine a as really nice lampstand.
3. If someone can give anonther one that they toasted I can tie
   the two of them together with a piece of string and use them as a
   bolo to hunt Ostriches in South America.

> a *truly* horrible thought is the inevitable work to be done to
> converge the two flashroms again but that should not be your
> problem except if you want to. ;)

This is not out of the question. I have been looking at that
source but have not been able to do a 'git clone' on it, but
might be able get it eventually. There are some addtional command
line options that might be nice to have in addition to the
chromebook stuff that they are probably concentrating on. I'm
refering to the fact that there are a zillion different chromebooks out
there. Intel based is one that comes immediately to mind, as
apposed to arm.  Do you have a wish list?

Bruce