[RFH] SPI and SPI-NOR patch help

[Michael Walle]

On Sat Feb 14, 2026 at 7:58 PM CET, Conor Dooley wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 13, 2026 at 10:46:07AM -0600, Tom Rini wrote:
>> Hey all,
>> 
>> To be blunt, U-Boot needs help with reviewing and maintaining the SPI
>> and SPI-NOR subsystems. We haven't had someone with time to actively
>> work in this area for some time. I'm going through the outstanding
>> changes now, but it also seems a common problem is that with respect to
>> device IDs, most of the new ones also aren't in the upstream Linux
>> Kernel. Is there some better and generic solution we're missing so that
>> we don't have large and often growing device ID tables? I'd rather not
>> make that problem worse, so I've rejected two of those types of updates
>> today and I'm just setting aside a large number of others.
>
> Dunno if your timing was cursed on sending this, but Tudor submitted his
> resignation from spi-nor maintainership in the kernel about 10 mins
> after.
> I think Michael Walle might be responsible for what you're talking about
> here, with his 773bbe1044973 ("mtd: spi-nor: add generic flash driver"),
> but idk jack about spi-nor stuff.

Yeah. Nowadays SPI-NOR flashes come with self describing tables,
which are already supported by u-boot, I think. The only change that
seems to be missing is the fallback to it if an id isn't found in
the flashdb. Only thing is, the SFDP doesn't describe all features,
most prominent example being locking. So if you need that, you'll
still need to have an entry per flash.

In fact, in linux I'm planning to change to make it probe SFDP first
and then amend it with the flashdb information (if there is an
entry).

-michael
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 297 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <https://lists.denx.de/pipermail/u-boot/attachments/20260216/d7973995/attachment.sig>