A523/A527 SPI Flash support?

[RoganDawes]

Hi folks,

Is there anyone looking at implementing SPI flash support for the A523/A527, and possibly T527 chip? I have just received my pre-order of the Radxa A5E, and am trying to write their NOR image to the SPI flash. My distro didn't recognise the chip, so I cloned the repo, built and tried spiflash-info, only to be told that it is not yet supported.

Thanks!

Rogan

[apritzel]

The manual suggests that the SPI controller in the A523/A527/T527 (all the same chip) is compatible to the previous one, however it doesn't work. Poking around in the BSP reveals that apparently the FIFO status register at 0x1c no longer reports the FIFO level, instead this is now done with a new register at offset 0x400. So this would require some changes in the code, on top of the expected SoC adaptations (pinmux, clocks). I have a (non-working) patch for the latter, but didn't try the new FIFO register yet.

[PopCat19]

Just confirming this issue on another A523 device, an unbranded "Eksvefot A10" tablet I got from Amazon:

~ 
❯ sunxi-fel version
AWUSBFEX soc=00001890(A523) 00000001 ver=0001 44 08 scratchpad=00061500 00000000 00000000

~ 
❯ sunxi-fel spiflash-read 8192 32768 u-boot-spl.bin
SPI support not implemented yet for 1890 (A523)!

I'm hitting the same SPI support not implemented yet for 1890 (A523)! error on spiflash-read in attempts to get a firmware dump.

While I can't code the FIFO register fix myself, I'm open to build and test any experimental patches if you need someone to validate on this hardware.

[ddean-blip]

did this ever get any further im trying to back up a device now with the A527 chipset and running into issues .

/a527_dump$ sudo sunxi-fel spl u-boot-sunxi-with-spl.bin Warning: no 'soc_sram_info' data for your SoC (id=1890) SPL: eGON header is not found /a527_dump$ sudo sunxi-fel version Warning: no 'soc_sram_info' data for your SoC (id=1890) AWUSBFEX soc=00001890(unknown) 00000001 ver=0001 44 08 scratchpad=00001500 00000000 00000000 /a527_dump$ sunxi-fel spiflash-read xxxx xxxx u-boot-spl.bin ERROR: You don't have permission to access Allwinner USB FEL device

[apritzel]

@ddean-blip please try the latest git version of the tool, A523 support was merged in February. This wouldn't give you SPI support, but at least you can use the spl and uboot commands to load mainline U-Boot.

There is apparently a bit more to SPI support in general on the A523/T527, and it's also missing from Linux and U-Boot. Just adjusting to the new FIFO control register didn't work, this is confirmed by the BSP listing more differences. Sooner or later someone will get around to tackle this, but for now SPI is not yet usable in mainline on that SoC.