* Eric W. Biederman ebiederman@lnxi.com [051203 22:28]:
writing the cmos from the file afterwards and rebooting is fine, so it's not the cmos image that is wrong.
Could LinuxBIOS change the CMOS when doing a reboot?
Possibly. The only safe way after a bios flash is to toggle the power.
Good point. I will try that to see if it changes the behaviour
There are a couple of possibilities.
- cmos_util needs to be explicitly told not to do the linuxbios checksum calculation.
i've used file_to_cmos and cmos_to_file to switch. This should not do any checksumming at all..
- cmos_util has had problems when asked to flash all of the cmos options. (Sigsegv ...)
it seems to work fine. 256 bytes (which should be less as an option, because I don't necessarily want to set back the clock) Also, rereading the file after amibios corrected the checksum presents an identical file (only the time changed)
- The high 128 bytes are only moderately standard so it may be you have a board that stores them differently. We should be ok for intel and amd chipsets.
It's an AMD k8 chipset. I wondered whether I failed to look at even higher cmos values via 74/75 or something. but then again, LinuxBIOS never touches anything except the low 128 bytes.
And of course other mystic locations but I would exhaust the other possibilities first.
Power toggling seems a good start. Closed source proprietary software sucks for customers. Unfortunately it might rather make them think in terms of "bios is always complicated"
Stefan