[avrdude-dev] [bug #37812] STK500V2 not programming "blank" pages when not erasing flash (-D)

[Simon Sabato]

Follow-up Comment #2, bug #37812 (project avrdude):

Hi Joerg, 

The problem is that in the Arduino flow, the "full chip erase" is not
happening (since this would erase the bootloader) and instead the boot loader
erases PAGES during programming.  Of course, without that page erase,  nothing
would ever be programmed correctly... 

I agree that the "is_page_empty" optimization makes sense in most cases (where
a chip erase can be assumed).  But if the "-D" flag has been given, perhaps
AVRDUDE should not assume that the chip is fully erased?   Or perhaps another
command line option could be used to force writing all pages.  

I can understand your argument that this is a bootloader issue.   It does seem
to me to be faster and more flexible to provide a way to disable this
optimization in AVRDUDE.   Faster, because it doesn't require many page erases
to simulate a full-chip erase when only a few pages may need to be programmed.
  Flexible,  because I may want to program say the first 64KB from one ELF,
then another 64KB later from another ELF.  In which case I definitely can't
give a full-chip erase the second time, and I may not want to trust that the
flash is still erased at that point.  

Anyway, whatever you decide, thanks very much for all the effort you put
behind this great piece of open source technology.  May the source be with
you!  

-Simon 



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