[OLPC-devel] olpcflash 0.1.0 Alpha

Richard Smith smithbone at gmail.com
Wed Aug 16 00:58:54 EDT 2006


olpcflash now works.

I'm booting my board with Linuxbios from the SPI part.

If you are currently booting from a PLCC then please give this a try.
The rest of you should probably wait a bit and see if I've changed
professions to bricklaying.

One thing I noticed is that SPI boot is slower than the PLCC by just
enough that I thought it had crashed after "Copying LinuxBIOS to RAM."

To compile:

gcc -O olpcflash.c -o olpcflash

or if you test it under the buildrom uClibc env then you will need to
add the -static option

To use:

- Read.
./olpcflash -r filename

- Write (Write does an erase first)
./olpcflash -w filename

- Verify
./olpcflash -v filename

My testing/developement method was to compile it static and copy it to
a USB key.
Then using a serial console I boot under the buildrom env from PLCC,
mount the USB key, and run the program.

A side note is that I build with my USB mass storage 'use_delay' set
zero and that appears to be working fine for my massive sample set of
1 key.

What I claim to have tested and Works For Me:

- read
- write
- verify
- erase

Know Issues:

- THERE ARE NO SAFEGUARDS!!!

nuff said.

- Its really slow.

Currently it takes a little over 11 minutes to program the part.  A
large part of this is due to only doing a single byte each program
cycle.
The part can program up to 256 bytes each cycle so that may be the
next feature to add.  According to the typical program time in the
datasheet it will only drop to around 6 minutes though so it may not
be worth it.

- Re-entry from KBC reset back into KBC run mode causes the board to reboot.

Need to ask EnE about this.  For now putting the KBC back into run
mode after I finish the operation is disabled.  This will allow you to
use verify and make sure it worked ok.  If you use a PS2 keyboard you
are toast at this point.

-- 
Richard A. Smith
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