[LinuxBIOS] winflashrom architecture (Windows port of flashrom) -- looking for suggestions

Peter Stuge stuge-linuxbios at cdy.org
Tue May 1 06:08:42 CEST 2007


On Mon, Apr 30, 2007 at 10:50:07AM +0700, Darmawan Salihun wrote:
> 1. The kernel mode code a.k.a kernel mode device driver is as
> simple as possible and only provides "raw" functionality, i.e.
> capability to map the physical address space in which the BIOS
> chip is mapped into the requesting user mode code.

This would be OK, but there's a constant race between making the
window large enough and new flash chips.


> 2. The kernel mode driver implements the majority of the flashrom
> code and the usermode code is merely a "front-end" to the kernel
> mode device driver which provides all of the chip related logic.

I like this a bit better.


> Anyway, I'm also thinking about a quite "universal" interface
> between the user mode code and the kernel mode code. Perhaps a well
> defined interface

This requires a lot of extra work but has the benefit of only one
generic algorithm being implemented in the kernel, thus the kernel
driver will not have to be updated to support new flash chips. It
could however have to be updated when a new driver supporting all
SPI flash is released. (But not every time a new flash chip is
added.)

After having identified the chip the app would download the
appropriate microcode to the kernel driver; a set of rather
high-level instructions to be executed by the driver.


1. or 2. will be a lot less work though. Maybe start there.

I like 2.


//Peter




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