Release announcement
The
flashrom developers are happy to announce the release of
flashrom 0.9.3.
flashrom
is a utility for reading, writing, erasing and verifying
flash ROM chips.
flashrom
is designed to update 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.
- Flash chip package
agnostic. DIP32, PLCC32, DIP8, SO8/SOIC8, TSOP32, TSOP40,
TSOP48 and more have all been verified to work.
- 261 flash chip families
and half a dozen variants of each family.
- 152 different chipsets,
some with multiple flash controllers.
- 259 specifically supported
mainboards, many others will work out-of-the-box (but have
not yet been reported).
- 43 PCI devices, 5 USB
devices, and some other serial/parallel port devices can
be flashed or used for flashing.
- No physical access needed.
root access is sufficient for internal and PCI flashers,
normal user access is sufficient for USB and serial
flashers.
- 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, OpenBSD, DragonFly BSD, Nexenta, Solaris and Mac
OS X. Partial support for DOS (no USB/serial flashers) and
Windows (no internal/PCI flashers). 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:
- Dozens of newly supported
mainboards, chipsets and flash chips.
- Support for Realtek
RTL8139 NICs.
- Support for National
Semiconductor DP83815/DP83816 and DP83820 NICs.
- Support for Intel Gigabit
NIC SPI flashing (does not support Intel NICs with
parallel or LPC flash).
- Support for SPI flashing
via the Amontec JTAGkey2.
- Support for the RayeR
SPIPGM parallel-port based SPI flasher.
- Support for Loongson-2F
(MIPS) flashing.
- Support for OpenBSD.
- Security checks for some
boards with BMC/IPMI/IMC/other components which can
interfere with BIOS flashing.
- Bus Pirate SPI flasher
reliability and performance improvements.
- Added a udev rules file to
allow using certain USB-based programmers as non-root
user.
- Slightly changed command
line invocation. Please see the man page for details.
Experimental
new features:
- Portability groundwork for
PowerPC (big endian) and MIPS (big+little endian), but no
full support yet.
- Support for NVIDIA nForce
MCP61/MCP65/MCP67/MCP78S/MCP73/MCP79 SPI flashing.
- Support for building
flashrom against libpayload.
Infrastructural
improvements and fixes:
- Lots of cleanups,
refactoring, and readability improvements in the code.
- Various bugfixes and
workarounds for broken third-party software.
- Various Intel ICH SPI
improvements.
- Various timer calibration
related improvements.
- Multiple SPI reliability
and functional improvements.
- Improved documentation.
Download
flashrom
0.9.3 can be downloaded in various ways:
Anonymous
checkout from the subversion repository at svn://svn.coreboot.org/flashrom/tags/flashrom-0.9.3
A
tarball is available for download at
http://qa.coreboot.org/releases/flashrom-0.9.3.tar.bz2 GPG
signature.
