Flashrom
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Flashrom is a utility which can be used to detect BIOS chips (DIP, PLCC), read their contents and write new contents on the chips ("flash the chip").
Supported devices
Note: There are probably some flash ROM chips which are compatible to the ones listed below.
Flash chips
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Flash chips (cont'd)
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Southbridges
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1 Unsupported, disabled by default.
2 This includes the ICH, ICH0, ICH2, ICH2-M, ICH3-S, ICH3-M, ICH4/ICH4-L, ICH4-M, ICH5/ICH5R, ICH6/ICH6R, ICH6-M, ICH7DH, ICH7/ICH7R, ICH7M, ICH7MDH, ICH8/ICH8R, ICH8DH, and ICH8DO chipsets. ICH2: Identifying and reading chips seems to work, but there are reports that writing may not work on some mainboards.
4 Untested, but should work.
5 Might also work for other CLE266 based EPIAs.
Supported mainboards
This is a list of mainboards where we have verified that they either do or do not need any special initialization to make flashrom work (given flashrom supports the respective southbridge and ROM chip), or that they do not yet work at all. If they do not work, support may or may not be added later.
Mainboards which don't appear in the list may or may not work (we don't know, someone has to give it a try). Please report any further verified mainboards on the mailinglist or add them here directly.
Known-good
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Known-good (but special setup required)
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Known-bad
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1 Used in the IGEL WinNET III thin client.
Installation
Requirements
Flashrom requires the pciutils and zlib and the respective development packages in order to be built.
In Debian unstable these development packages are called pciutils-dev and zlib1g-dev. Most other distributions call them pciutils-devel and zlib-devel.
Manual Installation
$ svn co svn://linuxbios.org/repos/trunk/util/flashrom $ make $ sudo make install
Debian
$ sudo apt-get install flashrom
Fedora
$ sudo yum install flashrom
Usage
Detect whether flashrom knows about your chipset/mainboard/BIOS chip:
$ flashrom
Read the current BIOS image into a file:
$ flashrom -r backup.bin
Write a BIOS image (proprietary or LinuxBIOS) on the ROM chip:
$ flashrom -wv newbios.bin