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

Posted: Tue Mar 23, 2010 7:21 pm
by sharky
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

Re: New flashing program for DOS/Linux/FreeBSD/NetBSD/MacOSX

Posted: Sat Jun 19, 2010 3:49 pm
by admin
Interesting tool, I'll add a link to our BIOS Utilities page!

Re: New flashing program for DOS/Linux/FreeBSD/NetBSD/MacOSX

Posted: Sat Jun 19, 2010 4:18 pm
by sharky
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.

Re: New flashing program for DOS/Linux/FreeBSD/NetBSD/MacOSX

Posted: Mon Jul 25, 2011 8:45 am
by Phoran`
Can you please post Precompiled DOS version of flashrom?