Dear experts,
I'm new to J-FLASH and J-LINK. Please advise.

A customer has a board with STM32F746 and QSPI flash.
Their program has data in the QSPI flash, and they flash the app using J-LINK and J-Flash.

Now, I cannot figure out how J-Flash deals with QSPI without "external loaders"?
And programming the QSPI part of the data does not work for me.
The internal flash part programs OK. Erase of the QSPI also looks OK. So I assume that J-LINK itself, cables, power are OK.
The customer says they never had any issue with flashing. Just drop a file to it and it does its magic.
Below is the only config dialog I could find related to the QSPI.
What else is missing?




Messages in the log window:

Alex,
The customer have sent me their .jflash file, but they have a different J-LINK variant. I have Plus and they Pro.
Are these two variants different enough in the aspect of external flash programming?

Notice that the flash bank #2 definition in the .jflash does not go to any details about the pin configuration of the STM32F746, its clock rate and even about the flash chip.
J-Flash seems to detect all this alone. Is this correct?

Btw, I don't believe that you are not familiar with the term "external flash loader". Perhaps it is called differently in German.

Thanks,
- dd

TL;DR the recent J-Flash versions (from 7.82) have a special way to handle QSPI flash:
you need to specify the QSPI controller pins as the "loader name", for example "CLK@PB2_nCS@PB6_D0@PD11_D1@PD12_D2@PE2_D3@PD13".

This means:
CLK->PB2
CS->PB6
D0-3 -> PD11,PD12,PE2,PD13

Alternative pinouts can be selected in drop-down list.
Knowing the pinout, J-Flash sets up the QSPI controller and reads the flash ID and standard parameters table.
This includes the erase block size, command codes, times etc.
With this information it can automagically handle variety of flash chips.

Older J-Flash versions (as my customer's 7.68) probably use some heuristic to detect the pinout, it luckily works on their board.
Version 7.82 failed for me because of a bug; it has been fixed in 7.82e and now works fine (until the next bug, of course

So the good news is that the customer can install the latest J-Flash; the bad news is that they have to specify the obscure "loader name" which they weren't aware of.