Re: [linux-sunxi] Re: Mainlining Linux Sunxi SoC AW USB

[Petr Vorel <petr.vorel@gmail.com>]

Hi Chris, all,

[ Dropping Greg and linux-usb@vger.kernel.org ]
> Peter,

> On Sat, 24 Jul 2021 at 15:22, Petr Vorel <petr.vorel@gmail.com> wrote:

> > Hi Greg,

> > > On Sat, Jul 24, 2021 at 03:41:42PM +0200, Petr Vorel wrote:
> > > > > Why is this even a driver at all, it looks like you can write a small
> > > > > userspace program using libusb to do everything it does, right?  What
> > > > > exactly is this driver needed for?

> > > > I'm sorry for not providing more info at the beginning. This is a driver for
> > > > host computer (i.e. developers laptop) used by LiveSuit tool [2] to flash Images
> > > > to the NAND of Allwinner devices. LiveSuit itself [3] is unfortunately provided
> > > > only in binary form. The only open source code with GPL v2 license is awusb
> > > > driver. Thus I thought I could ease my life with upstreaming at least the
> > > > kernel driver. But maybe it's not a good idea. I'm using LiveSuit for flashing
> > > > Allwinner A31, but it requires quite old distro due libqtgui4. Maybe sunxi folks
> > > > use something newer nowadays, but I haven't found anything in their wiki.

> > > Ah, that's not going to be good then.  Really, this doesn't seem to need
> > > to be a driver at all, and the ioctls are really strange so we would
> > > need to change them anyway before it could be merged.  But with no
> > > access to userspace code, that will be quite difficult, so I would push
> > > back on allwinner and have them work on resolving this.
> > Understand, it makes sense. Thanks for your time!

> > @Sunxi community: am I missing something? Using LiveSuit with old distro chroot
> > and Xephyr with out-of-tree module isn't fun :(.

> Suggest you take a look at sunxi-tools - specifically the sunxi-fel
> tool. This is a libusb-based userland tool to talk to these devices.
> I'm not sure if it supports flashing to nand on A31 - never tried it -
> but have used it to flash to eMMC and SPI flash on their other chips.
Thanks for a tip. Looking into sources it does not look like sunxi-fel supports
NAND.

Also from Debian wiki [1] (which describes bootable SD Card) it looks like only
old Allwinner u-boot supported access to NAND, thus I'd be surprised if
sunxi-tools supported it. sunxi-bootinfo does not implement NAND,
sunxi-nand-image-builder (which is not built by default) creates raw NAND
images, but now word about flashing.

I wonder why NAND is (probably) not supported by sunxi? Lack of documentation?

Kind regards,
Petr

[1] https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/Allwinner

> hth,
> Chris


> > Kind regards,
> > Petr

> > > thanks,

> > > greg k-h

> > --
> > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "linux-sunxi" group.
> > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to linux-sunxi+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
> > To view this discussion on the web, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/linux-sunxi/YPwiGB7VnzECN/jg%40pevik.