Re: GDB support for flash: implementation

[Daniel Jacobowitz <drow@false.org>]

On Mon, Jun 05, 2006 at 05:02:38PM -0400, Daniel Jacobowitz wrote:
> Jim and I were talking about this earlier and didn't really come to a
> conclusion.  I don't like Eflash; I think it's unnecessarily
> complicated, and that it would actually be simpler to ask the target
> to tell us where its flash is.

Jim asked me to expand on this.

What Eflash would basically do would be return a piece of the
target's memory map.  So we've always got a little bit of that
map when we need it, and there's a temptation to hold on to it
and get a better picture of the target as we go along.  But that's
a bad temptation, because of the incompleteness; so why not
sidestep it and build the map up front?

Either way, at least in some cases, the map will be incomplete.
For instance, it may not indicate where all RAM and I/O devices
are.  But this way at least we know where all the flash devices are.
The target won't come along and surprise us later.

Mark asked a related question about writes to flash regions which fail
to use the flash-specific packets; in my opinion, and Jim's, the right
thing to do is still to return an error.  I just don't want the error
to convey information needed for the retry.

-- 
Daniel Jacobowitz
CodeSourcery