History

The early years — flash updates with linux

Formerly OpenBIOS provided its own flashing facility implemented as a device driver called /dev/bios. One big disadvantage of /dev/bios was that it needed to be recompiled for every minor kernel update.

Ollie Lho, back when working at SIS, started a new effort which he called flash_and_burn. This utility became part of the coreboot project and evolved to work with non-SIS chipsets.

Stefan Reinauer added a lot of new features to Ollie's utility and renamed it to flashrom. This utility still lacked some features the old /dev/bios driver was having, but it could easily be used from userspace without recompiling the kernel.

Becoming a widely used user-space flash utility

• carldani
• own homepage
• releases
• chromiumos fork

Continuous efforts

• stefanct
• most important changes...?
• logo
• git