Flashrom

flashrom is a utility for identifying, reading, writing, verifying and erasing flash chips. It's often used to flash BIOS/EFI/coreboot/firmware images.

• Supports more than 195 flash chips, 75 chipsets, 130 mainboards, and 17 devices (PCI or USB) which can be used as external programmers.
• Supports parallel, LPC, FWH and SPI flash interfaces and various chip packages (DIP32, PLCC32, DIP8, SO8/SOIC8, TSOP32, TSOP40, TSOP48, and more)
• 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 chip 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 often much faster than most vendor flash tools.
• Portability. Supports Linux, FreeBSD, DragonFly BSD, Solaris, Mac OS X, and other Unix-like OSes.

Emergency help

IMPORTANT: If something went wrong during flashing, do NOT turn off/reboot your computer. Instead, let us help you recover. We can be contacted via IRC (#flashrom on irc.freenode.net) or email. Please allow for a few hours until someone responds on IRC, we're all volunteers.

Supported hardware

See Supported hardware.

Download & installation

See Downloads.

FAQ / Troubleshooting

See FAQ.

Flash chip overview

See Technology.

Useful information

Random notes

Flash chip handling is still mostly a black art, so we've collected useful snippets from email and IRC conversations on our Random notes page:

• What numbers do FWH/LPC chips tend to start with?
• Dirty little secrets why chips are not found although the chipset and the chip are supported
• Patch submission
• Command set secrets
• Writing or reusing a probe function
• flashchips.c rules
• Finding GPIOs for board enable routines

Open development

We welcome contributions from every human being, corporate entity or club.

If you want to contribute patches or test reports, please send them to our flashrom mailing list. For one-off test reports, you don't have to subscribe, but if you want to contribute patches, we strongly recommend you subscribe to our mailing list to make communication easier.

Flashrom development is volunteer-driven, and our developers tackle the features they're interested in. Most developers have pretty long personal TODO lists, so if you want to suggest a feature, please make sure you have all the datasheets and/or programming guides needed for that feature (preferably without NDA). For testing, our developers usually need physical access to the hardware in question. It also helps to be friendly to the developers.

Paid support/development

Some companies and individual developers offer paid flashrom support and development if you desire a particular feature nobody is working on.

Donations

We've been asked repeatedly about a way to donate to the flashrom project. Donations are a great way to show your appreciation for the project (and it may have saved you loads of money for dedicated flash programmer devices). Since this usually involves a lot of paperwork, we're not accepting donations to the project (yet).

Many of our developers do appreciate flashrom related hardware donations, though.

In the meantime, we ask you to spread the word about flashrom to your friends, to colleagues at work, to the local computer user group and to the readers of your blog.