[avrdude-dev] special handling of 0xff in flash memory

[Brian Dean]

Hi,

I've just committed a change that affects the handling of flash
memory.  Basically, any time a file on disk is read into memory, it's
size is reported such that 0xff padded data is ignored.  This has the
affect of causing avrdude to only write up to the last non 0xff data
values into the flash, ignoring the rest.  This is valid because
writing 0xff to flash is bascially a no-op anyway.

Likewise, if you instruct avrdude to dump the contents of flash to a
file, trailing 0xff data will not be written and the file size will be
shortened as a result.

Again, these optimizations affect the flash only since the flash is
the only memory that treats 0xff as special.

I've tested these pretty well, but as always, watch out any problems I
may have inadvertantly introduced.

BTW, I got this idea from Alexey's s-record code, where similar
support was recently removed.  This latest change should have a
similar affect on all the output formats, not just s-record output.

Cheers,
-Brian
-- 
Brian Dean
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