On Mon, 8 Mar 2010 16:04:31 -0800, Ed Swierk eswierk@aristanetworks.com wrote:
On Sat, Mar 6, 2010 at 8:13 AM, Carl-Daniel Hailfinger c-d.hailfinger.devel.2006@gmx.net wrote:
- Tiny flashrom stub for remote flashing over serial/network/whatever
(~10 kB uncompressed and 3 kB lzma compressed, maybe even smaller). 3. Load flashrom from an external medium (serial/USB/floppy/whatever) to RAM and execute it (no space requirements). ... Variant 2 is essentially a stripped down SerialICE with one or two extra commands. Rather slow, but you can upgrade the controlling flashrom app on the master computer (and test patches) without having to mess with the contents of the flash in the slave (to be reflashed) computer. Besides that, it allows even such stuff as PCI card reflashing (for gPXE and stuff). Variant 3 has a high initial load time, but flashing will be fast. No guarantees on how to recover if flashrom crashes or exits prematurely, though.
I implemented a little hack a while ago that let you download a payload via xmodem over serial:
http://www.coreboot.org/pipermail/coreboot/2006-October/016120.html
It looks like most of the code has since vanished, but the xmodemReceive() function is still there, and might be useful for some kind of last-ditch failover mechanism.
We also have a small program on Set-Top-Linux to send flash commands to the original bios over Serial Console:
http://www.settoplinux.org/index.php?title=RCA_RM4100:Howto_coreboot_and_Lin...
You just copy bios image to drive, boot, and flash over serial console. It may be nothing, but it could be a start to something that could be used for recovery???