[flashrom] Giving to -i option some real use

[David Hendricks]

Hello Salvador,
Yes, this is a very useful feature - we've had it in the chromiumos branch
for a while now :-)

I need to read your implementation. Ours is called "fast-verify" which will
read and only verify portions of the flash specified with -i arguments.

It will also restore content surrounding regions (to address Michael's
concern) by aligning the bytes read with the erase size. So if you wish to
change a small amount of content within an eraseable block, the entire
block will be read and erased. The region specified with -i will be written
with new content, and the remaining bytes within the block will have the
old content restored.

Here's our tree in case you'd like to take a look:
https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/third_party/flashrom/


On Tue, Apr 19, 2016 at 10:48 AM, Salvador Eduardo Tropea <
salvador at inti.gob.ar> wrote:

> Hi All!
>
> Now I'm using an FPGA board with 4 MiB of flash, was using one with 128
> kiB. So now the time to read/write/verify the whole memory is enough to
> annoy me ;-)
> So I tried creating a layout like this:
>
> <--
> 00000000:00007e2b fpga
> 00007e2c:003fffff free
> <--
>
> Note: yes only 32300 bytes used, the rest can be used for other purposes
> (0,77%).
>
> And then I used "-i fpga".
> But it didn't help ... flashrom read the 4 MiB twice (one at the beggining
> and another for the verification).
> Looking at the code I found a variable named read_all_first with a comment
> about the lack of implementation.
> So I implemented the needed code to:
> 1) Add a command line option to make it 0 (avoiding the big reads). This
> option can be used only when at least one image is indicated with -i
> 2) Skip the big read when read_all_first is 0. Only the regions indicated
> by the user are actually fetched from the memory.
> 3) Same for the verification stage.
>
> Additionally I added a command line option to show the progress, very
> usefull for big memories (and impatient users ;-).
>
> Are these additions desired in the project? If yes: I want to discuss the
> implementation details. If no: I'll just keep them for my use.
>
> Regards, SET
>
> --
> Ing. Salvador Eduardo Tropea          http://utic.inti.gob.ar/
> INTI - Micro y Nanoelectrónica (CMNB) http://www.inti.gob.ar/
> Unidad Técnica Sistemas Inteligentes  Av. General Paz 5445
> Tel: (+54 11) 4724 6300 ext. 6919     San Martín - B1650KNA
> FAX: (+54 11) 4754 5194               Buenos Aires * Argentina
>
>
>
>
>
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>



-- 
David Hendricks (dhendrix)
Systems Software Engineer, Google Inc.
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