// the find
jhcloos/flashrom
Mirror of svn://flashrom.org/flashrom
flashrom detects, reads, writes, verifies and erases flash chips, mostly the BIOS, EFI and coreboot firmware chips on a mainboard, but also NICs, SATA controller cards and external programmers. This mirror of the upstream svn repo is for people who need to flash real hardware, not for developers looking for a library.
- flashchips.c is the core of the project: a large table of chip definitions keyed by vendor and device ID. sfdp.c can also read geometry and command sets from a chip's own SFDP table, so newer parts can work without a hand-written entry.
- Programmer support is broad. Chipset drivers such as ichspi.c and sb600spi.c sit alongside external ones: ch341a_spi, dediprog, ft2232_spi, usbblaster_spi, pickit2_spi and buspirate_spi. serprog lets you drive a chip from any microcontroller that speaks the protocol in Documentation/serprog-protocol.txt.
- layout.c supports partial read and write by region, and util/flashrom_partial_write_test.sh tests that path. That is the kind of test you want before trusting a tool with a BIOS image.
- The README is out of date. It refers to freenode IRC, svn export targets, and a DJGPP setup built on pciutils 3.1.5 and an old cross toolchain. Use the build section as a starting point and check the Makefile.
- The mirror was last pushed on 2023-10-26. Unless you confirm it tracks upstream svn, you may be building older chip tables and drivers than the project has today.
- The laptop warning is one line in the README, but embedded controllers can interfere with flash access and a bad write can brick the machine. Anyone using this on real hardware should treat the backup step as mandatory, not optional.
- Internal PCI programmers are not supported on Windows, so in-system flashing means Linux or BSD. Clang users are also told to pass WARNERROR=no to build with only one driver enabled, which points to a build that is still fragile for some toolchains.