How can I list the partition table of a currently running esp32 devboard?

Question

I am developing on an ESP32 devboard (esp8266, wroom). I need to get the partition table of the currently running device.

This document contains a quite good documentation of its partition table. I can also read/write flash regions by the esptool.py and parttool.py tools. These can manage and modify the table well.

However, I did not find a way to read its partitions. How can I do it?

Answer 1

The current tools of the ESP32 have no explicit option for that. However, the existing tools can be easily combined to do this.

The partition table is located at 0x8000 (32768) on older, and on 0x9000 (36384) on newer systems. Anyways, its location can be found (and be set) at the CONFIG_PARTITION_TABLE_OFFSET setting in the menuconfig. Its length is always 0xc00 (3072) bytes.

With the esptool.py, this can be read out, for example by the command

python $(IDF_PATH)/components/esptool_py/esptool/esptool.py read_flash 0x9000 0xc00 ptable.img

And then, the gen_esp32part.py tool can be used to convert it to csv to the stdout: gen_esp32part.py ptable.img.

For some scripting, these tools can be also combined, for example in a Linux

(python $(IDF_PATH)/components/esptool_py/esptool/esptool.py \
  read_flash 0x9000 0xc00 /dev/fd/3 >&2) 3>&1|python \
  $(IDF_PATH)/components/partition_table/gen_esp32part.py /dev/fd/0

will dump the table to the stdout.

Answer 2

I'm trying the following:

gen_esp32part.py partable.bin

on a file that is called "partable.bin" which is the extracted partition table using esptool. But gen_esp32part.py keeps throwing the following error:

gen_esp32part.py: error: the following arguments are required: input

Update: Nevermind, turns out when typing the script name directly, it gets fed to the pylauncher, which doesn't pass on the arguments. I had to use:

python gen_esp32part.py partable.bin

then it worked.