New flashing program for DOS/Linux/FreeBSD/NetBSD/MacOSX...

Recommended by Wim's BIOS...

Hi,

flashrom (http://www.flashrom.org/) recently got support for DOS (it has been available for Linux/FreeBSD/NetBSD/MacOSX for quite some time). I thought maybe some people would be interested.

Advantages:

• Free
• Support for pretty much every modern flash chip (especially SPI flash)
• Support for pretty much every chipset released in the last 12 years (some new Nvidia chipsets are work in progress)
• Support for a few network cards, SATA/PATA(IDE) controllers, graphics cards
• Support for external flasher/programmer hardware (in case you don't want to hotflash/crossflash), e.g. cheap FT2232H USB cables, expensive dedicated Dediprog programmers
• Active development
• Open source (GPL)
• Support on the flashrom mailing list (if you like mailing lists) and IRC
• If something goes wrong, you can ask the developers for a patch before you reboot
• Reflash from a running system, no enforced reboot. If something goes wrong while flashing under Linux/..., you can keep using the machine and retry as often as you want (well, until you switch the machine off)
• Crossflashing/hotflashing supported (flashrom doesn't check mainboard/ROM matching at all)
• If you want support for an unsupported chip, just ask

Disadvantages:

• Doesn't support Windows yet (well, some stuff is supported under Windows and there are patches for full functionality)
• You have to compile the source code yourself

[admin]

Interesting tool, I'll add a link to our BIOS Utilities page!

Thanks!

By the way, you might be interested in adding http://blogs.coreboot.org/ to your blogroll. It has various BIOS-related topics (flashrom, coreboot, UEFI, SeaBIOS, ...) and we already link to http://www.wimsbios.com/blog/ on that page. There are so few BIOS-related blogs out there that we should stick together.

Can you please post Precompiled DOS version of flashrom?