440GX + peek/poke utility

[Fillod Stephane]

>I probably just wasn't looking hard enough but would anyone know if a
>peek/poke type command line utility would exist for accessing physical
>addresses under Linux on a 440GX board ?  Thanks.

I have such, and I wanted to contribute them to busybox. My peek/poke
even support hotplug (as long as your hardware can do so :-).

On a background note, we used to access physical addresses under U-Boot, 
but the interface was not very confortable, especially for the hardware
guys who type with 2 fingers. They were quite happy when we switched to
Linux (full command line editing, shell scripts under NFS, remote operation,
etc.). This is nowadays possible thanks to all the opensource hardworkers
who make Linux ported quickly after U-Boot, if not at the same time.
Be they thanked all. REM: one has to know that accessing directly physical 
addresses under an active OS like Linux can add some noise which does not
exist under a monitor like U-Boot.

Before contributing, I was wondering what would be a good command line 
interface. Right now, here it is:

	peek <b|w|l> <addr> [count]
	poke <b|w|l> <addr> <data>

The base of the args is automatically chosen by strtoul().

The memory access is done by this snippet (code is GPL)
 http://www.denx.de/twiki/bin/view/PPCEmbedded/DeviceDrivers#Section_AccessingPeripheralsFromUserSpace

I haven't contributed the code yet because I'm not satisfied with 
the syntax. I would prefer setpci syntax, e.g: "3c.l=1,2,3" which 
would translates to "write longword 1 to location at 3c, 2 at 40 
and 3 at 44", and allow several on the command line.
As you often call several times peek/poke in a shell script, time 
between I/O can be too significant and fall in side effects compared 
to a real driver. Thus, ability to gather several writes would be nice.
What do you all think? Do you have other ideas?

Also currently missing:
* 64 bit support (addr on 64bit archs, data type 'q')
* flag to specify little/big endian operation
* poke of more than one value (cf. setpci syntax)
* option to peek/poke binary values (a kind of dd) to stdin/stdout
  so they can be piped with od -x, redirected to a file, etc.
* option to choose the base of values output by peek
* option to set a range with same value/pattern
* option -f to perform the operation on a file instead of /dev/mem
* and maybe syntax sugar to do atomic +1/-1 on a hardware reg, 
  set_bit/clear_bit (ala linux/include/asm/bitops.h), ..

Wishlist anyone?

I guess it would be nice to have peek/poke working also for PCI devices
(ie. addr relative to PCI ressource base) and PC ISA I/O bus. While the PCI 
access may be addressed by setpci, I don't see much activity with 
the PC ISA I/O bus, except with parallel port tinkering :)


Best Regards

-- 
Stephane  [... speaking only on my own behalf]