[GTALUG] long war story: growing the ESP (/boot/efi)

[Stewart C. Russell]

On 2021-07-14 11:47 a.m., Lennart Sorensen via talk wrote:
> 
> Consumer grade flash often only has 10000 write cycles.  Especially if
> it isn't expected to be updated very much.  Different price point.

Can confirm from annoying experience that these QSPI flash chips really
don't have many write cycles. The ARM Cortex-M4 micro-controller boards
I'm very fond of use the same flash chips as PC BIOSes do: typically
tiny WinBond 8-pin things.

In a moment of great inattention (even by my standards) I hooked an 800
kHZ 'smart' LED strip to the same channel as the board's flash storage.
What was being clocked to the LEDs wasn't quite valid flash storage
commands, but it did a number on the chip in under a minute. The poor
thing was nowhere to be found on the bus after that.

cheers,
 Stewart