I am doing a firmware upgrade using SPI bus on EEPROM as well as Internal ROM of 8051, basically writing a .hex file on both these memory devices.I am able to see .hex file written there.I am able to see slave and master are communicating properly, but not able to write anything on my memory devices.
If you have suggestions and if you have faced similar problems, please let me know where is the actual problem.
Any inputs would be welcomed.
Regards,
Ravi
I think more information will likely be required. In any case, here a few pitfalls I could see:
Hex Files are not necessarily memory images. The 8051s I've worked with usually use Intel Hex which is an ASCII format that describes the memory. The format is well documented here.
If you're having trouble writing to the EEPROM, you may not be writing the proper instructions. Typically, SPI EEPROM will be Byte addressed, but still has paging internally. You should start your writes on a Page boundary and write the whole page, then issue another write command, etc. By convention if you overrun a page, or start in the middle of a page it will loop around. So if your page is 8 bytes long, and you start writing 0-7 starting at index 4, you'll get:
Page Start: Index 0 = 4
Index 1 = 5
Index 2 = 6
Index 3 = 7
Index 4 = 0
Index 5 = 1
Index 6 = 2
Index 7 = 3
Most EEPROMs have locking mechanisms to prevent accidental writes once they are finalized. If the lock has been set, you will need to write an unlocking method (this will be detailed in the data sheet if it has it)
To further help you, please reference part numbers and better yet Data Sheets if you can.
Related
I have test code that starts with a large existing file on SD Card, test.dat, and the test does this:
f_open(&fp, "test.dat", FA_OPEN_ALWAYS|FA_READ|FA_WRITE);
f_write(&fp, bufferOfZeros, 4096, &ioBytes);
Seems straight forward.
The result of the f_write is SD Card corruption.
I've traced the EDMA on my embedded device to watch FatFs read/write requests. The f_open read requests are all healthy, they properly find the file and FAT table.
The f_write starts by reading the first sector into scratch buffer, great. Then it memcpy's the zeros into the scratch buffer, great. After memcpy of 512 zeros, it needs to commit the sector and move to the next one.
It's at this point where the code is confused. It writes that scratch buffer of zeros to the FAT table!!
The offending code in ff.c/f_write() is:
if (fp->flag & FA__DIRTY) { /* Write-back sector cache */
if (disk_write(fp->fs->drv, fp->buf, fp->dsect, 1) != RES_OK)
ABORT(fp->fs, FR_DISK_ERR);
fp->flag &= ~FA__DIRTY;
Here, fp->buf is the sector buffer of zeros, but fp->dsect is the FAT sector (8318), not the file data sector (10240)! Oops. At disk_write() fp->buf matches fp->sect.
Seems like a basic use case here, I am shocked to see this.
I'm hoping someone in the world has anyone dug into a problem like this before with FatFs?
Clifford is correct - it's a problem on my end, and I knew such a simple use case has to work.
I switched the test to
f_open(&fp, "test.dat", FA_OPEN_ALWAYS|FA_READ|FA_WRITE);
f_write(&fp, pattern, 512, &ioBytes);
f_lseek(&fp, 0);
f_read(&fp, zeroedBuffer, 512, &ioBytes);
This revealed a caching problem. The f_read operation succeeded, and the DMA completed fine, but zeroedBuffer remained unmodified because L0 was not flushed. Therefore, FatFs was seeing a mix of correct values and stale values. I fixed EDMA caching and now it all works.
Another learning, TI Starterware comes with R0.4b. I started with that, and it returned FR_RW_ERROR that was perplexing. I moved up to R0.11a and got much better error feedback.
Anyone know of unit tests for FatFs?
I have a board with quite a few flash chips, some of them are showing intermittent failures. Standard memory tests are not showing any specific problem addresses, other than certain chips are failing intermittently under mechanical and thermal stress.
Suspecting the actual connections and not the flash cells themselves, I'm looking for a way to test the parallel bus for address or data pin errors.
There are some memory tests but they apply better to RAM rather than flash memory (http://www.ganssle.com/testingram.htm). Specifically, the parallel flash has a sequence of bus writes to write to each value; a write/verify failure could easily be the write operation which could be any pin on the bus.
Ideas welcome...
The typical memory tests are there to do that. I prefer a pseudo randomizer (deterministic using an lfsr) to the 0xAA, 0x55, 0xFF, 0x00 tests. This allows for an address bus test as well as data bus test in two passes (repeat inverted). I say typical in the sense of wiggle the data bits and address bits both states each and vary the states of signals and their neighbors. The pounding on a ram to create thermal or other stresses, well you cant write very fast to a flash so you cant really do fast write/read cycles.
Flash creates another problem and that is writing then reading back isnt that interesting, you want to write the read back later, hours, days, weeks to determine if the part is actually holding data.
When you say thermal or stress do you mean only during the time it is above X degrees it fails, or do you mean that due to thermal stress it is broken all the time after the event. Likewise with mechanical, while vibrating or under mechanical stress the part fails, but when relieved of that stress it is okay, or the mechanical stress has done permanent damage that can be detected under stress or not.
Now although you cant do fast write/read cycles, you can punish a flash by reading heavily. I have seen read-disturb problems by constant reading of one block or location. Not necessarily something you have time to do for every location, but you might fill the ram with a pseudo random pattern and concentrate on one location for a while, (minutes, tens of minutes), if you have a part that you know is bad see if this accelerates the detection of the problem and if any location will work or only certain ones. then another thing is to read all the locations repetitively for hours/days or leave it sit for hours/days/weeks and then do a read pass without an erase or write and see if it has lost anything.
unfortunately as you probably know each new failure case takes its own research project and development of a new test.
First step to test a memory is data bus test0 0 0 0 0 0 0 • In this test, data bus wiring is properly tested to0 0 0 0 0 0 0 confirm that the value placed on data bus by processor0 0 0 0 0 0 0 is correctly received by memory device at the other end0 0 0 0 0 0 00 0 0 0 0 0 0 • An obvious way to test is to write all possible0 0 0 0 0 0 0 data values and verify 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 • Each bit can be tested independently• To perform walking 1s test, write the first data value given in the table, verify by reading it back, write the second value, verify and so on. • When you reach the end of the table, the test is complete
In the linked article Jack Ganssle says: "Critical to this [test], and every other RAM test algorithm, is that you write the pattern to all of RAM before doing the read test."
Since reading should be isolated from writing, testing the flash is easier. Perform the writing portion of the tests while the system is not under stress. Then perform the reading portion with the system under stress. By recording the address, expected value, and actual value in enough error cases, you should be able to determine the source of the errors.
If the system never fails when doing the above, you can then perform the whole tests while under stress. Any errors that appear are most likely write errors.
I've decided to design a memory pattern that I think I can deduce both data and address errors from. The concept is to use values significantly different as key indicators of possible read errors. The concept is also to detect a failure on one pin at a time.
The test will read alternately from only bottom and top addresses (0x000000 and 0x3FFFFF - my chip has 22 address lines). In those locations I will put 0xFF and 0x00 respectively (byte wide). The idea is to flip all address and data lines and see what happens. (All other values in the flash have at least 3 bits different from 0x00 and 0xFF)
There are 44 addresses that a single pin failure could send me to in error. In each address put one of 22 values to represent which of the 22 address pin was flipped. Each are 2 bits different from each other, and 3 bits different from 00 and FF. (I tried for 3 bits different from each other but 8 bits could only get 14 values)
07,0B,0D,0E,16,1A,1C,1F,25,29,2C,
2F,34,38,3D,3E,43,49,4A,4F,52,58
The remaining addresses I put a nice pattern of six values 33,55,66,99,AA,CC. (3 bits different from all other values) value(address) = nicePattern[ sum of bits set in address % 6];
I tested this and have statistically collected 100s of intermittent failure incidents synchronized to the mechanical stress.
single bit errors detectable
double bit errors deducible (Explainable by a combination of frequent single bit errors)
3 or more bit errors (generally inconclusive)
Even though some of the chips had 3 failing pins, 70% of the incidents were single bit (they usually didn't fail at the same time)
The testing group is now using this to identify which specific connections are failing.
I'm currently working on a project that involves a lot of bit level manipulation of data such as comparison, masking and shifting. Essentially I need to search through chunks of bitstreams between 8kbytes - 32kbytes long for bit patterns between 20 - 40bytes long.
Does anyone know of general resources for optimizing for such operations in CUDA?
There has been a least a couple of questions on SO on how to do text searches with CUDA. That is, finding instances of short byte-strings in long byte-strings. That is similar to what you want to do. That is, a byte-string search is much like a bit-string search where the number of bits in the byte-string can only be a multiple of 8, and the algorithm only checks for matches every 8 bits. Search on SO for CUDA string searching or matching, and see if you can find them.
I don't know of any general resources for this, but I would try something like this:
Start by preparing 8 versions of each of the search bit-strings. Each bit-string shifted a different number of bits. Also prepare start and end masks:
start
01111111
00111111
...
00000001
end
10000000
11000000
...
11111110
Then, essentially, perform byte-string searches with the different bit-strings and masks.
If you're using a device with compute capability >= 2.0, store the shifted bit-strings in global memory. The start and end masks can probably just be constants in your program.
Then, for each byte position, launch 8 threads that each checks a different version of the 8 shifted bit-strings against the long bit-string (which you now treat like a byte-string). In each block, launch enough threads to check, for instance, 32 bytes, so that the total number of threads per block becomes 32 * 8 = 256. The L1 cache should be able to hold the shifted bit-strings for each block, so that you get good performance.
i'm trying to write a routine that will logically bitshift by n positions to the right all elements of a vector in the most efficient way possible for the following vector types: BYTE->BYTE, WORD->WORD, DWORD->DWORD and WORD->BYTE (assuming that only 8 bits are present in the result). I would like to have three routines for each type depending on the type of processor (SSE2 supported, only MMX suppported, only standard instruction se supported). Therefore i need 12 functions in total.
I have already found by myself how to backup and restore the registers that i need, how to make a loop, how to copy data into regular registers or MMX registers and how to shift by 1 position logically.
Because i'm not familiar with assembly language that's about it.
Which registers should i use for each instruction set?
How will the availability of the large vector (an image) in L1 cache be optimized?
How do i find the next element of the vector (a pointer kind of thing), i know i can make a mov by address and i assume i have to increment the address by 1, 2 or 4 depending on my type of data?
Although i have all the ideas, writing the code is a bit difficult at this point.
Thank you.
Arnaud.
Edit:
Here is what i'm trying to do for MMX for a shift by 1 on a DWORD:
__asm("push mm"); // backup register
__asm("push cx"); // backup register
__asm("mov %cx, length"); // initialize loop
__asm("loopstart_shift1:"); // start label
__asm("movd %xmm0, r/m32"); // get 32 bits data
__asm("psrlq %xmm0, 1"); // right shift 32 bits data logically (stuffs 0 on the left) by 1
__asm("mov r/m32,%xmm0"); // set 32 bits data
__asm("dec %cx"); // decrement index
__asm("cmp %cx,0");
__asm("jnz loopstart_shift1");
__asm("pop cx"); // restore register
__asm("pop mm"); // restore register
__asm("emms"); // leave MMX state
I strongly suggest you pause and take a look at using intrinsics with C or C++ instead of trying to write raw asm - that way the C/C++ compiler will take care of all the register allocation, instruction scheduling and general housekeeping tasks and you can just focus on the important parts, e.g. instead of using psrlq see _m_psrlq in mmintrin.h. (Better yet, look at using 128 bit SSE intrinsics.)
Sounds like you'd benefit from either using or looking into BitMagic's source. its entirely intrinsics based too, which makes its far more portable (though from the looks of it your using GCC, so it might have to get an MSVC to GCC intrinics mapping).
I'm not talking about algorithmic stuff (eg use quicksort instead of bubblesort), and I'm not talking about simple things like loop unrolling.
I'm talking about the hardcore stuff. Like Tiny Teensy ELF, The Story of Mel; practically everything in the demoscene, and so on.
I once wrote a brute force RC5 key search that processed two keys at a time, the first key used the integer pipeline, the second key used the SSE pipelines and the two were interleaved at the instruction level. This was then coupled with a supervisor program that ran an instance of the code on each core in the system. In total, the code ran about 25 times faster than a naive C version.
In one (here unnamed) video game engine I worked with, they had rewritten the model-export tool (the thing that turns a Maya mesh into something the game loads) so that instead of just emitting data, it would actually emit the exact stream of microinstructions that would be necessary to render that particular model. It used a genetic algorithm to find the one that would run in the minimum number of cycles. That is to say, the data format for a given model was actually a perfectly-optimized subroutine for rendering just that model. So, drawing a mesh to the screen meant loading it into memory and branching into it.
(This wasn't for a PC, but for a console that had a vector unit separate and parallel to the CPU.)
In the early days of DOS when we used floppy discs for all data transport there were viruses as well. One common way for viruses to infect different computers was to copy a virus bootloader into the bootsector of an inserted floppydisc. When the user inserted the floppydisc into another computer and rebooted without remembering to remove the floppy, the virus was run and infected the harddrive bootsector, thus permanently infecting the host PC. A particulary annoying virus I was infected by was called "Form", to battle this I wrote a custom floppy bootsector that had the following features:
Validate the bootsector of the host harddrive and make sure it was not infected.
Validate the floppy bootsector and
make sure that it was not infected.
Code to remove the virus from the
harddrive if it was infected.
Code to duplicate the antivirus
bootsector to another floppy if a
special key was pressed.
Code to boot the harddrive if all was
well, and no infections was found.
This was done in the program space of a bootsector, about 440 bytes :)
The biggest problem for my mates was the very cryptic messages displayed because I needed all the space for code. It was like "FFVD RM?", which meant "FindForm Virus Detected, Remove?"
I was quite happy with that piece of code. The optimization was program size, not speed. Two quite different optimizations in assembly.
My favorite is the floating point inverse square root via integer operations. This is a cool little hack on how floating point values are stored and can execute faster (even doing a 1/result is faster than the stock-standard square root function) or produce more accurate results than the standard methods.
In c/c++ the code is: (sourced from Wikipedia)
float InvSqrt (float x)
{
float xhalf = 0.5f*x;
int i = *(int*)&x;
i = 0x5f3759df - (i>>1); // Now this is what you call a real magic number
x = *(float*)&i;
x = x*(1.5f - xhalf*x*x);
return x;
}
A Very Biological Optimisation
Quick background: Triplets of DNA nucleotides (A, C, G and T) encode amino acids, which are joined into proteins, which are what make up most of most living things.
Ordinarily, each different protein requires a separate sequence of DNA triplets (its "gene") to encode its amino acids -- so e.g. 3 proteins of lengths 30, 40, and 50 would require 90 + 120 + 150 = 360 nucleotides in total. However, in viruses, space is at a premium -- so some viruses overlap the DNA sequences for different genes, using the fact that there are 6 possible "reading frames" to use for DNA-to-protein translation (namely starting from a position that is divisible by 3; from a position that divides 3 with remainder 1; or from a position that divides 3 with remainder 2; and the same again, but reading the sequence in reverse.)
For comparison: Try writing an x86 assembly language program where the 300-byte function doFoo() begins at offset 0x1000... and another 200-byte function doBar() starts at offset 0x1001! (I propose a name for this competition: Are you smarter than Hepatitis B?)
That's hardcore space optimisation!
UPDATE: Links to further info:
Reading Frames on Wikipedia suggests Hepatitis B and "Barley Yellow Dwarf" virus (a plant virus) both overlap reading frames.
Hepatitis B genome info on Wikipedia. Seems that different reading-frame subunits produce different variations of a surface protein.
Or you could google for "overlapping reading frames"
Seems this can even happen in mammals! Extensively overlapping reading frames in a second mammalian gene is a 2001 scientific paper by Marilyn Kozak that talks about a "second" gene in rat with "extensive overlapping reading frames". (This is quite surprising as mammals have a genome structure that provides ample room for separate genes for separate proteins.) Haven't read beyond the abstract myself.
I wrote a tile-based game engine for the Apple IIgs in 65816 assembly language a few years ago. This was a fairly slow machine and programming "on the metal" is a virtual requirement for coaxing out acceptable performance.
In order to quickly update the graphics screen one has to map the stack to the screen in order to use some special instructions that allow one to update 4 screen pixels in only 5 machine cycles. This is nothing particularly fantastic and is described in detail in IIgs Tech Note #70. The hard-core bit was how I had to organize the code to make it flexible enough to be a general-purpose library while still maintaining maximum speed.
I decomposed the graphics screen into scan lines and created a 246 byte code buffer to insert the specialized 65816 opcodes. The 246 bytes are needed because each scan line of the graphics screen is 80 words wide and 1 additional word is required on each end for smooth scrolling. The Push Effective Address (PEA) instruction takes up 3 bytes, so 3 * (80 + 1 + 1) = 246 bytes.
The graphics screen is rendered by jumping to an address within the 246 byte code buffer that corresponds to the right edge of the screen and patching in a BRanch Always (BRA) instruction into the code at the word immediately following the left-most word. The BRA instruction takes a signed 8-bit offset as its argument, so it just barely has the range to jump out of the code buffer.
Even this isn't too terribly difficult, but the real hard-core optimization comes in here. My graphics engine actually supported two independent background layers and animated tiles by using different 3-byte code sequences depending on the mode:
Background 1 uses a Push Effective Address (PEA) instruction
Background 2 uses a Load Indirect Indexed (LDA ($00),y) instruction followed by a push (PHA)
Animated tiles use a Load Direct Page Indexed (LDA $00,x) instruction followed by a push (PHA)
The critical restriction is that both of the 65816 registers (X and Y) are used to reference data and cannot be modified. Further the direct page register (D) is set based on the origin of the second background and cannot be changed; the data bank register is set to the data bank that holds pixel data for the second background and cannot be changed; the stack pointer (S) is mapped to graphics screen, so there is no possibility of jumping to a subroutine and returning.
Given these restrictions, I had the need to quickly handle cases where a word that is about to be pushed onto the stack is mixed, i.e. half comes from Background 1 and half from Background 2. My solution was to trade memory for speed. Because all of the normal registers were in use, I only had the Program Counter (PC) register to work with. My solution was the following:
Define a code fragment to do the blend in the same 64K program bank as the code buffer
Create a copy of this code for each of the 82 words
There is a 1-1 correspondence, so the return from the code fragment can be a hard-coded address
Done! We have a hard-coded subroutine that does not affect the CPU registers.
Here is the actual code fragments
code_buff: PEA $0000 ; rightmost word (16-bits = 4 pixels)
PEA $0000 ; background 1
PEA $0000 ; background 1
PEA $0000 ; background 1
LDA (72),y ; background 2
PHA
LDA (70),y ; background 2
PHA
JMP word_68 ; mix the data
word_68_rtn: PEA $0000 ; more background 1
...
PEA $0000
BRA *+40 ; patched exit code
...
word_68: LDA (68),y ; load data for background 2
AND #$00FF ; mask
ORA #$AB00 ; blend with data from background 1
PHA
JMP word_68_rtn ; jump back
word_66: LDA (66),y
...
The end result was a near-optimal blitter that has minimal overhead and cranks out more than 15 frames per second at 320x200 on a 2.5 MHz CPU with a 1 MB/s memory bus.
Michael Abrash's "Zen of Assembly Language" had some nifty stuff, though I admit I don't recall specifics off the top of my head.
Actually it seems like everything Abrash wrote had some nifty optimization stuff in it.
The Stalin Scheme compiler is pretty crazy in that aspect.
I once saw a switch statement with a lot of empty cases, a comment at the head of the switch said something along the lines of:
Added case statements that are never hit because the compiler only turns the switch into a jump-table if there are more than N cases
I forget what N was. This was in the source code for Windows that was leaked in 2004.
I've gone to the Intel (or AMD) architecture references to see what instructions there are. movsx - move with sign extension is awesome for moving little signed values into big spaces, for example, in one instruction.
Likewise, if you know you only use 16-bit values, but you can access all of EAX, EBX, ECX, EDX , etc- then you have 8 very fast locations for values - just rotate the registers by 16 bits to access the other values.
The EFF DES cracker, which used custom-built hardware to generate candidate keys (the hardware they made could prove a key isn't the solution, but could not prove a key was the solution) which were then tested with a more conventional code.
The FSG 2.0 packer made by a Polish team, specifically made for packing executables made with assembly. If packing assembly isn't impressive enough (what's supposed to be almost as low as possible) the loader it comes with is 158 bytes and fully functional. If you try packing any assembly made .exe with something like UPX, it will throw a NotCompressableException at you ;)