[flashrom] [PATCH] Use slow toggle for erase, debug excessive delay

Michael Karcher Michael.Karcher at fu-berlin.de
Wed Dec 16 12:53:35 CET 2009


Am Mittwoch, den 16.12.2009, 02:26 +0100 schrieb Carl-Daniel Hailfinger:
> Today's systems are quite capable of running 2^32 reads in short time.
> Some chips may be slow enough to fall off the loop here. Other chips may
> be slow enough to cause delays of more than 2^20 read cycles.
> 
> If the JEDEC Toggle Bit algorithm needs more than 2^20 loops, it is a
> good sign we should have used delays between toggle bit reads.
> 
> The Winbond W39V040C requires a 50 ms delay between toggle bit reads
> during erase according to the datasheet. Turns out a 2 ms delay is
> sufficient. Use a safety factor of 4 and default all erase operations to
> 8 ms delay between toggle reads. This is short enough not to have a
> substantial negative impact on erase times, and should improve reliability.
> 
> Signed-off-by: Carl-Daniel Hailfinger <c-d.hailfinger.devel.2006 at gmx.net>

While your patch looks OK, I somehow dislike your comment. The main
problem addressed is not falling out of the loop, but the Winbond chip
being slow on toggling, so that you read two times the same value of the
toggle bit while the operation is still in progress, unless you wait for
some ms between reads. Looks like the toggling of the toggle bit is
implemented in "software" in that chip instead of being implemented in
hardware driven by the read instructions.

2^20 iterations should be around 1 second on ISA, and i doubt that LPC
or FWH are much faster. For LPC, 15 LPC clocks are needed for
read/write. As an example, I checked the maximum LPC clock of the
W39V040C which is 33MHz. So 2^20 iterations still are 0.5 seconds.

Still, as the code is OK:
Acked-By: Michael Karcher <flashrom at mkarcher.dialup.fu-berlin.de>

Regards,
  Michael Karcher
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