openocd-user

[OpenOCD-user] flash bank for TI cc3200 launchpad

[Christopher H. <ch...@ba...>]

I'm looking at the configuration file for TI's cc3200 launchpad board
that shipped with openocd-0.9. The board has a flash chip with part
number W25Q80BL connected directly to the cc3200's "boot" SPI pins. When
reading the reference manual for the cc3200 I noticed that the boot SPI
port was designed specifically for reading in a program to run on boot
and that it can be accessed directly from the base address of 0x44020000
-> 0x44020FFF. The cc3200 has no internal flash. I was wondering why
openocd doesn't include a flash bank configuration for this board. As it
stands TI's "uniflash" tool is only supported on windows leaving the
Linux community without a means to flash this chip. I'm not proficient
with OpenOCD, but I feel like the cfi flash driver should be able to
handle this case out of the box. I'm not on my development machine now,
so I can't post the configuration I tried, but I was mostly guessing so
it's probably all garbage anyway. If anybody has any insight into how to
configure OpenOCD to read/write the flash on this board please let me
know and I'll post my results, and hopefully fully support this board in
future OpenOCD releases.

Thanks,
Chris

Re: [OpenOCD-user] flash bank for TI cc3200 launchpad

[Paul F. <fer...@gm...>]

Hello,

On Wed, Aug 12, 2015 at 10:15:25AM -0400, Christopher Harvey wrote:
> The board has a flash chip with part
> number W25Q80BL connected directly to the cc3200's "boot" SPI pins.
...
> I feel like the cfi flash driver should be able to handle this case
> out of the box.

The CFI driver can work only with CFI-compliant (and some partially
compliant) devices. SPI NOR flash memory can't be CFI-compliant
because it doesn't have a parallel interface that's attached directly
to the memory bus.

OpenOCD has some support for SPI memory but it requires
target-specific driver. If you can find some docs and implement that
for cc3200, that would be great. I seem to remember cc3200 is also
using some undocumented "flash file system" and that's another
complication, you have to prepare an image in suitable format before
flashing.

Shame on TI for not being open enough with those chips (that said, TI
behaves nicely in many other regards).

-- 
Be free, use free (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html) software!
mailto:fer...@gm...

Re: [OpenOCD-user] flash bank for TI cc3200 launchpad

[Christopher H. <ch...@ba...>]

On Wed, Aug 12, 2015, at 03:41 PM, Paul Fertser wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> On Wed, Aug 12, 2015 at 10:15:25AM -0400, Christopher Harvey wrote:
> > The board has a flash chip with part
> > number W25Q80BL connected directly to the cc3200's "boot" SPI pins.
> ...
> > I feel like the cfi flash driver should be able to handle this case
> > out of the box.
> 
> The CFI driver can work only with CFI-compliant (and some partially
> compliant) devices. SPI NOR flash memory can't be CFI-compliant
> because it doesn't have a parallel interface that's attached directly
> to the memory bus.
> 
> OpenOCD has some support for SPI memory but it requires
> target-specific driver. If you can find some docs and implement that
> for cc3200, that would be great. I seem to remember cc3200 is also
> using some undocumented "flash file system" and that's another
> complication, you have to prepare an image in suitable format before
> flashing.
> 

What about using the 'load_image' command and pointing it at 0x44020000?
Is that something that could work? Examples for other devices would be
appreciated if they exist.