Flashrom/0.9.4

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 0.9.4.

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

flashrom is designed to flash BIOS/EFI/coreboot/firmware/optionROM images on mainboards, network/graphics/storage controller cards, and various programmer devices. It can do so without any special boot procedures and from your normal working environment.

After over 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

• Parallel, LPC, FWH and SPI flash interfaces.
• Support for onboard programming and external programmers.
• 284 flash chip types with a number of variants each.
• 173 different chipsets, some with multiple flash controllers.
• 306 mainboards verified to be working.
• Flash chip package agnostic. DIP32, PLCC32, DIP8, SO8/SOIC8, TSOP32/40/48, BGA and more have all been verified to work.
• 50 PCI devices, 9 USB devices, 1 parallel port device, and all external serprog-based programmers can be flashed or used for flashing.
• 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, NetBSD, DragonFly BSD, OpenBSD, Nexenta, Solaris, Mac OS X and DOS. Please refer to the README for build instructions.

Thanks go to everyone who contributed to flashrom over the years.

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.flashrom.org/

New major user-visible features

• Support for new programmers:
  • OpenMoko Neo1973/Neo FreeRunner debug board version 2 or 3, FTDI FT2232-based (r1231)
  • Olimex ARM-USB-TINY, ARM-USB-TINY-H, ARM-USB-OCD, and ARM-USB-OCD-H, FTDI FT2232-based (r1331)
  • Open Graphics Project development card, OGD1 (r1241)
  • Angelbird Wings PCIe SSD/88SX7042 (r1258)
  • ITE IT85xx embedded controllers (r1262)
  • Intel NIC with parallel flash (r1297)
• Dozens of added flash chips, chipsets, mainboards.
• Improved user interface.
• Reliability fixes for buggy hardware, buggy third party software and corner case spec conformance.
• Improved Dediprog SF100 support.
• Update port of flashrom package to Mac OS X using DirectHW.
• Improved support for protection status printing and chip unlocking.
• Fix and improve libpayload platform support.
• Add support for more than one Super I/O or EC per machine.
• Always read the flash chip before writing, for improved error checking and faster programming.
• Enable write support on NVIDIA MCP6x/MCP7x.
• Added SPI flash emulation capability to the dummy programmer.

Infrastructural improvements and fixes

• Shutdown function registration
• Improved error messages
• Correctness fixes
• Various workarounds for broken hardware
• Code cleanups

Download

flashrom 0.9.4 can be downloaded in various ways:

Anonymous checkout from the subversion repository at svn://flashrom.org/flashrom/tags/flashrom-0.9.4

A tarball is available for download at

http://download.flashrom.org/releases/flashrom-0.9.4.tar.bz2 (GPG signature).

Supported hardware

Please see the archived status page for the hardware supported by this release.