Flashprog/v1.6

Icon — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 11:02:03 GMT

RC1 -> RC2

← Older revision		Revision as of 11:02, 15 August 2026
Line 105:		Line 105:
	** AMD Phoenix is finally tested! though it's hard to get an unlocked system.		** AMD Phoenix is finally tested! though it's hard to get an unlocked system.

	= Download ~~RC1~~ =		= Download RC2 =

	''flashprog v1.6'' can be downloaded in various ways:		''flashprog v1.6'' can be downloaded in various ways:

	Anonymous checkout of the tag ''v1.6-~~rc1~~'' from git repositories at		Anonymous checkout of the tag ''v1.6-rc2'' from git repositories at
	* [https://github.com/SourceArcade/flashprog/releases/tag/v1.6-~~rc1~~ https://github.com/SourceArcade/flashprog.git]		* [https://github.com/SourceArcade/flashprog/releases/tag/v1.6-rc2 https://github.com/SourceArcade/flashprog.git]
	* [https://review.sourcearcade.org/plugins/gitiles/flashprog/+/refs/tags/v1.6-~~rc1~~ https://review.sourcearcade.org/flashprog.git]		* [https://review.sourcearcade.org/plugins/gitiles/flashprog/+/refs/tags/v1.6-rc2 https://review.sourcearcade.org/flashprog.git]

	A tarball is available for download at		A tarball is available for download at

	https://flashprog.org/releases/flashprog-v1.6-~~rc1~~.tar.bz2		https://flashprog.org/releases/flashprog-v1.6-rc2.tar.bz2
	[http://flashprog.org/releases/flashprog-v1.6-~~rc1~~.tar.bz2.asc (GPG signature)]		[http://flashprog.org/releases/flashprog-v1.6-rc2.tar.bz2.asc (GPG signature)]
	(see [[GPG_Signatures]])		(see [[GPG_Signatures]])

Flashprog/v1.5

Icon — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 05:43:32 GMT

Fix title of Download section

← Older revision		Revision as of 05:43, 11 August 2026
Line 28:		Line 28:
	* The build system uses a ''version.h'' now, and there were some more minor tweaks.		* The build system uses a ''version.h'' now, and there were some more minor tweaks.

	= Download ~~RC1~~ =		= Download v1.5 =

	''flashprog v1.5'' can be downloaded in various ways:		''flashprog v1.5'' can be downloaded in various ways:

Flashprog/v1.6

Icon — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 21:02:10 GMT

Created page with "{{DISPLAYTITLE:flashprog/v1.6}} This release brings a huge overhaul of flashprog's chip probing. Mostly SPI chips benefit from much faster probing times. Some refactoring was necessary to make this possible. As a positive side-effect, this should also make it easier to keep all programmer drivers maintained long-term, no matter if they serve old parallel flash or modern QSPI. = What Changed? = == Chip Probing == So far, flashprog walked through the whole chip databa..."

New page

{{DISPLAYTITLE:flashprog/v1.6}}

This release brings a huge overhaul of flashprog's chip probing. Mostly
SPI chips benefit from much faster probing times. Some refactoring was
necessary to make this possible. As a positive side-effect, this should
also make it easier to keep all programmer drivers maintained long-term,
no matter if they serve old parallel flash or modern QSPI.

= What Changed? =

== Chip Probing ==

So far, flashprog walked through the whole chip database, executing the
listed probing functions for every chip. That is, if a probing function
was listed for ''n'' chips, it was executed ''n'' times! Even though,
it should return the same result every time. Now we run the available
probing functions for each supported bus, store their results and then
compare these to the database entries.

There was one obstacle on the path, though: We used to pass a whole flash
context including the chip description into the programmer drivers. Why not?
we knew which chip we wanted to talk to, even during probing; until now.
Fortunately, the flash context wasn't used much in the programmer drivers,
so we could get rid of this quirk (with a few exceptions like optional,
optimized read/write functions). This lowers the coupling between chip
and programmer drivers, which again enhances maintainability.

== Emulated Dediprog Support ==

A small tweak in the Dediprog driver improves support for alternative
implementations of the Dediprog protocol on microcontrollers. For instance,
[https://github.com/ArthurHeymans/dedipico dedipico],
[https://github.com/ArthurHeymans/dedich32 dedich32].

== Intel Chipset Handling ==

We skip some more futile probing for memory-mapped flash chips on systems
where their bus simply isn't memory mapped. So far we limited the probing
only on laptops out of caution. Now this is decided by the detected chipset's
configuration. Skipping unnecessary probing again speeds up probing for what
we are looking for.

We've always warned the user when the BWE bit (BIOS Write Enable aka. Write
Protect Disable, WPD) couldn't be set. It still led to confusion when the
message got lost in too elaborate logs. We now set an internal flag that
disables writing and triggers the proper error message.

= What's New? =

== New Chip-Enumeration API ==

The chip-probing overhaul also provided some incentive to extend libflashprog's
API. There are new functions to enumerate either the whole chip database or the
chips matching the probing results. A chip from such an enumeration can then be
turned into a flash context to be used with the usual read/write/erase APIs.
Details about the chips can be queried too, of course.

== Individual Chip-Name Matching ==

One thing led to another and with the libflashprog changes, we ended up having
all matching of chip names from the command line to database entries in a single
function. This provided the opportunity to relax the matching consistently for
all CLIs. So far, when a database entry covered multiple chips, one had to
specify the whole string that identified the database entry, e.g.

$ flashprog -p ft4222_spi -c MX25L1605A/MX25L1606E/MX25L1608E

That was a lot to type for some entries and also confusing to the users. Now
it's possible to specify individual chip names, e.g.

$ flashprog -p ft4222_spi -c MX25L1606E

matches the same database entry. Another pattern were optional or alternative
suffixes in parentheses. For instance "MX25L1005(C)/MX25L1006E" can be matched
with
* MX25L1005
* MX25L1005C
* MX25L1005(C)
* MX25L1006E
or even
* MX25L1005/MX25L1006E
which should provide some backwards compatibility when database names are
adapted in the future.

== Additional New & Old Chips And Programmers ==

Beside a few new XMC SPI chips, we added support for very old ''M28F'' parallel
flash chips. The latter were mostly added to increase the test coverage of the
new probing code. For the same reason, a few simple programmer drivers popped up:
* ''gfxmatrox'' for Matrox Millenium graphics cards,
* ''scsilsi'' for old LSI SCSI adaptors, and
* ''nicamd'' for old AMD PCnet32 network cards.

= Smaller Changes & Fixes =

* Few build infrastructure improvements:
** The DJGPP container got an overdue update to GCC 12.
** Makefile was fixed for a corner case, when ''pkgconf'''s ''--static'' was failing.
** Meson linker arguments were fixed for Darwin.
** ''ni845x_spi'' our only Windows-only driver gets always build tested now, with a dummy header file.
* ''ch347_spi'' got a segfault fixed in combination with older libusb versions.
* A few chipset updates:
** Intel Wildcat Lake support,
** older Intel Q87 and H170 are tested now, and
** AMD Phoenix is finally tested! though it's hard to get an unlocked system.

= Download RC1 =

''flashprog v1.6'' can be downloaded in various ways:

Anonymous checkout of the tag ''v1.6-rc1'' from git repositories at
* [https://github.com/SourceArcade/flashprog/releases/tag/v1.6-rc1 https://github.com/SourceArcade/flashprog.git]
* [https://review.sourcearcade.org/plugins/gitiles/flashprog/+/refs/tags/v1.6-rc1 https://review.sourcearcade.org/flashprog.git]

A tarball is available for download at

https://flashprog.org/releases/flashprog-v1.6-rc1.tar.bz2
[http://flashprog.org/releases/flashprog-v1.6-rc1.tar.bz2.asc (GPG signature)]
(see [[GPG_Signatures]])

= Supported hardware =

Please see the [[Flashprog/v1.6/Supported_Hardware|archived status page]] for
the hardware supported by this release.

Flashprog/v1.6/Supported Hardware

Icon — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 20:59:43 GMT

Created page with "= Supported devices = <div style="margin-top:0.5em; padding:0.5em 0.5em 0.5em 0.5em; background-color:#eeeeee; text-align:left; border:1px solid #aabbcc;"> '''Last update:''' 2026-08-10T20:57:39Z (generated by flashprog v1.6-rc1) The tables below are generated from flashprog's source by copying the output of '''flashprog -z'''. A short explanation of the cells representing the support state follows: {| border="0" valign="top" ! style="text..."

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Flashprog/v1.6

Flashprog/v1.5

Flashprog/v1.6

Flashprog/v1.6/Supported Hardware