Flashrom/0.9.0

This is an archived release notes page. For the release notes of the latest stable release please see here.

Release announcement

The flashrom developers are happy to announce the release of flashrom 0.9.0.

flashrom is a utility for reading, writing, erasing and verifying flash ROM chips.

flashrom is often used to flash BIOS/coreboot/firmware images because it allows you to update your BIOS/coreboot/firmware without opening the computer and without any special boot procedures.

After nine years of development and constant improvement, we have added support for every BIOS flash ROM technology present on x86 mainboards and every flash ROM chip we ever saw in the wild.

Highlights of flashrom include:

• Parallel, LPC, FWH and SPI flash interfaces.
• 157 flash chip families and half a dozen variants of each family.
• Flash chip package agnostic. DIP32, PLCC32, DIP8, SO8/SOIC8, TSOP32, TSOP40 and more have all been verified to work.
• 75 different chipsets, some with multiple flash controllers.
• Special mainboard enabling code for dozens of nonstandard mainboards.
• No physical access needed. root access is sufficient.
• No bootable floppy disk, bootable CD-ROM or other media needed.
• No keyboard or monitor needed. Simply reflash remotely via SSH.
• No instant reboot needed. Reflash your ROM in a running system, verify it, be happy. The new firmware will be present next time you boot.
• Crossflashing and hotflashing is possible as long as the flash chips are electrically and logically compatible (same protocol). Great for recovery.
• Scriptability. Reflash a whole pool of identical machines at the same time from the command line. It is recommended to check flashrom output and error codes.
• Speed. flashrom is much faster than vendor flash tools.
• Supports Linux, FreeBSD, DragonFly BSD, Solaris, Mac OS X. Please refer to the README for build instructions.

Thanks go to everyone who contributed to flashrom over the years and especially to Li-Ta Lo for starting this project.

Please note that rewriting your flash chip can be dangerous and flashrom developers make no guarantees whatsoever. That said, many users have successfully replaced proprietary tools such as awdflash, amiflash and afudos with flashrom.

flashrom has its own home page at http://www.coreboot.org/flashrom

Download

flashrom 0.9.0 can be downloaded in various ways:

Anonymous checkout from the subversion repository at svn://coreboot.org/flashrom/tags/flashrom-0.9.0

Tarballs are available for download at

http://qa.coreboot.org/releases/flashrom-0.9.0.tar.gz GPG signature

http://qa.coreboot.org/releases/flashrom-0.9.0.tar.bz2 GPG signature.