linux+4.1.15+flash空间,spi flash support in embedded linux box

Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI) flash memory is often used in an embedded Linux box to hold bootloader. During very initial board bringup, SPI flash memory needs to be programmed properly using device like Dediprog, otherwise the box won’t boot. After the box is up running linux, often there is need to access SPI flash, e.g. upgrade new version of bootloader from linux. I will share what needs to be done for that.

SPI Flash: hardware overview

There are many flash memory devices in the market, often people see USB flash memory, SD card. Those flash memory are parallel flash, eithe NOR or NAND flash. With parell access, the throughput is a lot higher. SPI flash is accessed in a serial way, so it is much slower.

SPI devices communicate in full duplex mode using a master-slave architecture with a single master. The master device originates the frame for reading and writing. Multiple slave devices are supported through selection with individual slave select (SS) lines.

SCK: Serial Clock MOSI: Master Output Slave Input MISO: Master Input Slave Output SS: Slave Select

SPI Master often is provided by SoC, SPI flash device serves as SPI slave.

What are needed to enable SPI flash access from Linux ?

There are three areas to do in order to enable SPI flash access from Linux user space.

Enable SPI controller in device tree.

In my case, Marvell ARMADA 7040 SoC has SPI controller provided, I need do the following:bash-4.3# catarmada-7040-db.dts

...

[email protected] {

compatible = "marvell,armada-380-spi";

reg = <0x700680 0x50>;

#address-cells = <0x1>;

#size-cells = <0x0>;

cell-index = <0x2>;

clocks = <0x26 0x1 0x15>;

status = “okay";

[email protected] {

#address-cells = <0x1>;

#size-cells = <0x1>;

compatible = "jedec,spi-nor";

reg = <0x0>;

spi-max-frequency = <0x1312d00>;

[email protected] {

label = "boot";

reg = <0x0 0x200000>;

};

[email protected] {

label = "Filesystem";

reg = <0x200000 0xd00000>;

};

[email protected] {

label = "boot_2nd";

reg = <0xf00000 0x100000>;

};

};

};

...

From the above, DTS defined the SPI flash to have three partitions: “boot”, “Filesystem” and “boot_2nd”. We will see how this definition is manifested in linux system.

Integrate the dtb file into linux boot in a proper way depending your situation.

Enable proper kernel drivers for SPI

Linux kernel has done a lot work to support SPI flash so that user space can access SPI flash easily. It has following architecture:

To enable SPI access, the following kernel configurations are required:bash-4.3# cat .config

...

CONFIG_MTD=y

CONFIG_MTD_BLKDEVS=y

CONFIG_MTD_BLOCK=y

CONFIG_MTD_M25P80=y

CONFIG_MTD_SPI_NOR=y

CONFIG_MTD_SPI_NOR_USE_4K_SECTORS=y

...

CONFIG_SPI=y

CONFIG_SPI_MASTER=y

CONFIG_SPI_ARMADA_3700=y

...

Access from user space

With the changes in DTS and kernel, after linux boots, the below will be observed in kernel space:bash# dmesg

.......

[ 4.110288] m25p80 spi2.0: n25q128a13 (16384 Kbytes)

[ 4.115301] 3 ofpart partitions found on MTD device spi2.0

[ 4.120815] Creating 3 MTD partitions on "spi2.0":

[ 4.125632] 0x000000000000-0x000000200000 : "boot"

[ 4.130895] 0x000000200000-0x000000f00000 : "Filesystem"

[ 4.136619] 0x000000f00000-0x000001000000 : "boot_2nd"

.......

From the user space, the first thing can be seen is the mtd device files:bash# ls -l /dev/mtd*

crw------- 1 root root 90, 0 Feb 6 08:14 /dev/mtd0

crw------- 1 root root 90, 1 Feb 6 08:14 /dev/mtd0ro

crw------- 1 root root 90, 2 Feb 6 08:14 /dev/mtd1

crw------- 1 root root 90, 3 Feb 6 08:14 /dev/mtd1ro

crw------- 1 root root 90, 4 Feb 6 08:14 /dev/mtd2

crw------- 1 root root 90, 5 Feb 6 08:14 /dev/mtd2ro

brw------- 1 root disk 31, 0 Feb 6 08:14 /dev/mtdblock0

brw------- 1 root disk 31, 1 Feb 6 08:14 /dev/mtdblock1

brw------- 1 root disk 31, 2 Feb 6 08:14 /dev/mtdblock2

/dev/mtdblock0 is for “boot” (first bootloader) partition;

/dev/mtdblock1 is for “FileSystem” partition;

/dev/mtdblock2 is for “boot_2nd” partition.

what can we do now? Life is easy with all these infrastructure in place.To program a new version bootloader, simply: dd if=new-bootloader.bin of=/dev/mtdblock0

If we want to use partition as file system, simply:mkdir /mnt/spi

mkfs.jffs2 /dev/mtdblock1

mount -t jfss2 /dev/mtdblock1 /mnt/spi

Life is good!

References:http://free-electrons.com/blog/managing-flash-storage-with-linux/

http://slideplayer.com/slide/10452504/