flashrom/0.9.5

IMPORTANT: This is work in progress. Its purpose is to track improvements as they are pushed to our repository. Some of the stuff mentioned below may even be removed later.

Release announcement

The flashrom developers are happy to announce the release of flashrom 0.9.5.

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.
• FIXME flash chip types with a number of variants each.
• FIXME different chipsets, some with multiple flash controllers.
• FIXME 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.
• FIXME PCI devices, FIXME USB devices, FIXME 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:
  • FTDI FT2232-based:
    • Dangerous Prototypes Bus Blaster
    • TIAO/DIYGADGET USB Multi-Protocol Adapter (TUMPA)
    • GOEPEL PicoTAP
  • Rayer-compatible:
    • Xilinx parallel III (DLC5)
  • Linux SPI subsystem (spidev)
  • AMD Hudson chipsets
• Intel Hardware Sequencing

  Intel chipsets can be accessed via Hardware Sequencing now. This is a major step for better support for current, locked-down Intel-based mainboards (but it is not enough yet).

• SPI support for serprog
• The supported voltage ranges are now printed for each flash chip when called with -L, --list-supported.
• There are 3 levels of verbosity now, hence -VVV shows the most detailed messages.
• Better build support for PPCs.

Infrastructural improvements and fixes

• Code cleanups

Download

flashrom 0.9.5 can be downloaded in various ways:

Anonymous checkout from the subversion repository at svn://flashrom.org/flashrom/tags/flashrom-0.9.5

A tarball is available for download at

http://download.flashrom.org/releases/flashrom-0.9.5.tar.bz2 (GPG signature).

Supported hardware

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