XCore Exchange

Two questions for somebody who understands xflash better than me :

1. We have a board which uses 3 x XL232. However, due to current lead-time issues we can't get hold of any of those, but we can get XE232. I've built a couple of boards using XE232 instead of XL232 and they run and program with no changes to code or XN file (which is all still for XL232), and doing firmware upgrades seems to work fine too. Before I do a production batch, can anyone see any potential problems with this that I might have missed?

2. We have another board which uses 3 x XL216. Up to now I've always programmed these boards with the xflash --no-compression flag (mostly to reduce programming time). However, my uncompressed boot image is now bigger than factory image size that I specify when I program it. For various reasons, the simplest solution is to enable compression, which resolves the problem, but I just want to make sure there's no potential problems with this. So my question is : will a factory image programmed with compression still upgrade/boot to an uncompressed upgrade image, and conversely will an uncompressed factory image upgrade/boot a compressed upgrade image.

I can't answer (1) but the answer to (2) is you can mix and match compressed / uncompressed factory and / or upgrade images without penalty.

Thanks, that's helpful. I thought that was the case, and my experiments seem to confirm that, but couldn't find anything definitive in the documentation (actually I'm not sure the --no-compression flag is documented at all)

The only reason I know is from experiment. I suspect you could work it out from first principles but only if the --no-compression flag were documented.