Patch / RFC: add "flashcp" applet

Tito farmatito at tiscali.it
Sun Nov 15 17:16:46 UTC 2009


On Sunday 15 November 2009 15:18:46 Stefan Seyfried wrote:
> On Sun, 15 Nov 2009 14:57:33 +0100
> Tito <farmatito at tiscali.it> wrote:
> 
> > On Saturday 14 November 2009 22:53:22 Stefan Seyfried wrote:
> > > On Sat, 14 Nov 2009 22:15:14 +0100
> > > Tito <farmatito at tiscali.it> wrote:
> > > 
> > > > Hi,
> > > > just some ideas I had while looking at your patch,
> > > > hope they can help you to improve/optimize it.
> > > 
> > > Thanks, I will check them. I btw. just did not think of "puts" instead
> > > of "printf ... \n", will check all those, too.
> > > 
> > > > Ciao,
> > > > Tito
> > > > 
> > > > PS.: progress() is used only in two sites, is it worth the hassle, couldn't it be inlined?
> > > 
> > > My first incarnation used it more often (there were two loops, one for
> > > write and one for verify), and then it was a clear win. I will check if
> > > is still is now.
> > > 
> > 
> > snip 
> > 
> > > > 
> > > > 	Use xioctl here?
> > > 
> > > I actually want the "is no valid MTD flash" error here, not only "ioctl
> > > 0x12345 failed". Did you never try to fcp something
> > > into /dev/mtdblock/x? ;-)
> > 
> > You can set :
> >  Busybox Library Tuning
> > [*] Use ioctl names rather than hex values in error messages   
> 
> Yes, I know. I'd rather try to make the flashcp applet useful anyway.
> Experienced users do not need a flashcp program to bring their image
> into flash. The others might be thankful for a useful error message.
> 
> If you are really low on space and care for every byte, flashcp is not
> for you anyway. You just do the erase ioctl for the whole partition and
> then cat your image into the MTD device. No fancy flashcp is
> needed for this at all. Saves lots of space.
> 
> The whole purpose of flashcp is, IMO, to make the flashing a bit more
> "luxurious". By providing useful messages in case something goes wrong
> and by providing a useful progress indicator.
> 
> If i want to provide this, I will probably not get below 1200bytes.
> This is (for me) still much better than the >8kb the standalone version
> of flashcp needs on my powerpc systems. But then, I am not that short
> on space that I need the 7 kb urgently, so I'll just continue to use
> the standalone version instead of putting it into busybox.
> 

Hi,
maybe you can use:

if (ENABLE_FEATURE_DESKTOP) {
	your_ioctl_with_long_bb_error_msg_and_die()
} else {
	xioctl()   so user can choose error msg format
}

Ciao, ;-)
Tito



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