[flashrom] Libflashrom development and integration with fwupd

[Richard Hughes]

On Wed, 24 Oct 2018 at 11:57, <artur.raglis at 3mdeb.com> wrote:
> I suppose that returning function status (#2) is not necessary with
> query functions, so I'll stick to the first approach.

I think it's also a really good idea to have a "context" so that there
isn't any global state, i.e. some pointer returned by fl_init() that
can be used in all operations. Having global state in a library isn't
awesome -- and having a context lets you do memory management in a
sane way.

> Are there any new ideas / hints that we need to know for further development?

I don't think so; fwupd mainly cares about:

1) enumerating devices, which at the moment is controlled using a
whitelist on the machine DMI data:
https://github.com/hughsie/fwupd/blob/master/plugins/flashrom/flashrom.quirk
2) flashing a blob of memory on an abstract device, so we'd need to be
able to chose the flashrom programmer and not just flash the firmware
on some random device
3) verification of the flash process, e.g. just reading back what we
wrote and checking the blob is the same
4) progress reporting, with an update at least every 5 seconds
5) sane error reporting, e.g. providing a ASCII/UTF-8 string rather
than just setting a tty to write to.

Lastly, it's awesome you're driving this work forward. I'm happy to
test any WIP branch with fwupd, or do some sort of high-level API
review if that helps.

Richard.