Okay, I hate to sound naive, but what Windows versions can/will this support? I'm assuming 2000 and XP, what about Vista and 98? Also, where this is going to be a driver, will there be any problem with Vista complaining about it not being signed? Vista can be a real pain with drivers that aren't signed, the beta I was running had a workaround to allow you to boot, but I think that was removed from the retail release, which I have (free of charge, the only way I'd have it) but haven't installed yet.
And last (but not least), flashing the BIOS while running Windows always seems to have been a tricky beast, I bricked a couple boards using windows-based flash tools back in the day. Will there be any ill side effects and/or potential issues with this?
BTW, good work!
-Corey
Darmawan Salihun wrote:
Stefan Reinauer wrote:
Oh I love playing advocatus diaboli ;-)
- Jeremy Jackson jerj@coplanar.net [070611 16:58]:
One thing that should really drive this home, is that using this architecture on Linux *and* Windows, the same userspace tool could be used on both, so the fancy code for incremental updates, writing parameter blocks, etc., wouldn't have to be duplicated.
It should not be duplicated anyways. The Windows driver currently only takes care of mapping memory into user space if I remember correctly.
The current experimental windows driver is capable of _mapping_ the entire 4GB physical address space to user mode application and doing a direct IO transcation (which is bad :-( ). I'm currently working to limit the mapping to the top 16MB below the 4GB limit. It should be trivial. And other thing is to remove the direct IO routine because it's too dangerous and replace it with "Windows driver setup API" instead because what flashrom need is only the PCI id's and some other stuff that I think can be found in windows device configuration information through the setup API. (i.e. CM_xxx function in PnP "manager" or the SetupDi family of API). FYI, I haven't managed to complete a version that can be tested because of my exam last week. Hopefully there will be significant progress this week.
--Darmawan