[SerialICE] an idea

[Carl-Daniel Hailfinger]

On 26.11.2009 23:36, Maciej Pijanka wrote:
> 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?
>   

Maybe. Needs buffer management on the broken machine, but sounds usable.

Regards,
Carl-Daniel

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