[flashrom] idea: make flashrom a "driver" in linux kernel

[David Hendricks]

On Thu, Jan 30, 2014 at 6:21 AM, The Gluglug <info at gluglug.org.uk> wrote:

> Thanks. I'll take a look.
>
> As far as syntax is concerned it would not yield much benefit.
> I considered that this would be a bit more "standard" (everything is a
> file mentality).


Flashrom's syntax is kind of a gift and a curse. It's not the simplest, nor
is it the worst, but the getopt approach provides a huge amount of
flexibility when dealing with specific chips, chispets, external
programmers (Bus Pirate, Dediprog, etc), etc. which is pretty important to
flashrom.

We've also added a few of our own goodies in the chromium.org branch for
things like controlling write-protection, layout enhancements to vastly
speed up reading/writing desired portions, simplifying programmer syntax
for better uniformity, etc. Long story short, flashrom is useful for much
more than simply reading/writing ROMs and flexible syntax is a big help.

It may be useful to port support for particular chips and chispets into the
kernel so that flashrom may use /dev/spi (which is already supported) and
MTD also benefits those who prefer the dd syntax. This is already pretty
common on non-x86 systems, but for whatever reason it seems there has been
very little interest in making that happen in the x86 world.

/my $0.02


>
> On 30/01/14 14:20, Stefan Tauner wrote:
>
>> On Thu, 30 Jan 2014 13:27:39 +0000
>> The Gluglug <info at gluglug.org.uk> wrote:
>>
>>  Basically,
>>>
>>> /dev/spi
>>> This would be your flash chip, enumerated using flashrom.
>>>
>>> flashrom -r equivalent:
>>> dd if=/dev/spi of=dump.rom
>>>
>>> flashrom -w eqivalent:
>>> dd if=coreboot.rom of=/dev/spi
>>>
>>> Where SPI is the internal SPI chip on your motherboard.
>>> If (using flashrom as the backend) the linux kernel supports your flash
>>> chip, you could just use dd.
>>>
>>> What does the community think of this idea?
>>>
>> IMHO we are the wrong guys to ask this actually, and I predict the Linux
>> guys to be not very ambiguous (understatement) about it.
>>  From flashrom's perspective it does not make too much sense because we
>> have to implement it anyway (for all other OSes).
>> The main question for me is: what would you gain? dd syntax isnt really
>> that much more comfortable than ours IMO :)
>>
>> PS: There are probably more answers to this or similar questions in the
>> mailing list archive...
>>
>>
>
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>



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