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

From: Christopher Obbard <chris@64studio.com>
To: petr.vorel@gmail.com
Cc: Greg KH <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>,
	linux-usb@vger.kernel.org, linux-sunxi@lists.linux.dev,
	mailing list linux-sunxi <linux-sunxi@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: [linux-sunxi] Re: Mainlining Linux Sunxi SoC AW USB
Date: Sat, 24 Jul 2021 15:45:06 +0100	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <CAP03Xer3QK7gFa5szL7gQLq-=-muyPDzH-D24mhafDpUjj5=bw@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <YPwiGB7VnzECN/jg@pevik>

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.

hth,
Chris

>
> Kind regards,
> Petr
>
> > thanks,
>
> > greg k-h
>
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