[flashrom] Giving to -i option some real use

[Salvador Eduardo Tropea]

Hi David:

Thanks for your comments.


El 20/04/16 a las 20:42, David Hendricks escribió:
> 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.

What about writes? My problem is that I have a 4 MiB flash and that 
usually need to use 32kB from it.

> 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/

Thanks for the link.

Regards, SET


>
>
> On Tue, Apr 19, 2016 at 10:48 AM, Salvador Eduardo Tropea 
> <salvador at inti.gob.ar <mailto: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
>     <tel:%28%2B54%2011%29%204724%206300%20ext.%206919>     San Martín
>     - B1650KNA
>     FAX: (+54 11) 4754 5194 <tel:%28%2B54%2011%29%204754%205194>      
>            Buenos Aires * Argentina
>
>
>
>
>
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>
>
>
>
> -- 
> David Hendricks (dhendrix)
> Systems Software Engineer, Google Inc.


-- 
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