[SerialICE] an idea

[Maciej Pijanka]

On Thu, 26 Nov 2009, ron minnich wrote:

> On Thu, Nov 26, 2009 at 7:16 AM, Carl-Daniel Hailfinger
> <c-d.hailfinger.devel.2006 at gmx.net> wrote:
> > 2. Add serialice support to flashrom via an external programmer driver.
> > Will not work reliably for parallel and LPC flash due to timing
> > constraints: we have a few timeouts in the order of 50 ??? (microseconds)
> > during programming and I doubt we can reach a sustained data rate of 5
> > bytes (1 command, 3 addr, 1 data) per 50 ??? (100 kByte/s, 800 kbit/s)
> > over serial.
> 
> OK IIRC many of the parts we use can do bytewise programming, or is
> that memory wrong? If they can do bytewise programming, then there are
> no timing constraints between data bytes sent over serial, and we can
> have large inter-data-byte delays, and need only deal with the short
> delays between the sequence of FLASH writes for the commands and one
> byte of data to program each byte [did that make sense?].

If serialice connection between hardware and qemu host with 8029 will be ever ready
then part of pio rw-able memory buffer on chip can be used without any dma/irq 
as buffer for flashing, it isnt big, but 256bytes page will fit. 

I am not sure but maybe cache can be abused as buffer in case when above is not
possible and we need writing whole page not per byte?

best regards
Maciej

-- 
Maciej Pijanka
reg. Linux user #133161