LinuxBios and Openbios's dev/bios capacity

[Mathieu Deschamps]

I've found in OpenBios dev/bios a good reason to hope i could spare the
cost of a "physical" flashing device , and a ease using. That is to say
getting LinuxBios building the  .bin and flash the onboard BIOS via the
dev/bios mechanism.

I have a via/epia and a SST39 series 20A (256Ko) bios chip on
I'd thought I could read/write this bios with cat my.bin >/dev/bios
but by insmoding bios.o. But i got a kmess coming from lines 123-126 
printk code of bios.c 
      "BIOS : No flash devices found" 
This resulting in a console message "Device busy" (that is, though, a
bit paradoxal notfound != busy isn't it ? :) )

I can't catch what have missed me... Is dev/bios couldn't be used in
my aim ?

Gratefull if experienced people could help me.
 Cordialy.

Mathieu

[Greg Watson]

This seems like an openbios issue to me.

Greg

On 08/04/2004, at 7:23 AM, Mathieu Deschamps wrote:
> I've found in OpenBios dev/bios a good reason to hope i could spare 
> the
> cost of a "physical" flashing device , and a ease using. That is to say
> getting LinuxBios building the  .bin and flash the onboard BIOS via the
> dev/bios mechanism.
>
> I have a via/epia and a SST39 series 20A (256Ko) bios chip on
> I'd thought I could read/write this bios with cat my.bin >/dev/bios
> but by insmoding bios.o. But i got a kmess coming from lines 123-126
> printk code of bios.c
>       "BIOS : No flash devices found"
> This resulting in a console message "Device busy" (that is, though, a
> bit paradoxal notfound != busy isn't it ? :) )
>
> I can't catch what have missed me... Is dev/bios couldn't be used in
> my aim ?
>
> Gratefull if experienced people could help me.
>  Cordialy.
>
> Mathieu
> _______________________________________________
> Linuxbios mailing list
> [e-mail]
> http://www.clustermatic.org/mailman/listinfo/linuxbios

[Mathieu Deschamps]

err :) well that's true ... I hope to have some help ...

Up to a point theses projects are so close and so complementar,
I'd bet some LinuxBios people would have resolve this "elementary"
but annoying problem. More over, I saw that Stefan Reinauer posts
from times to times answer on this mailing list...

thanks whatever...

Le lun 12/04/2004 à 14:47, Greg Watson a écrit :
> This seems like an openbios issue to me.
>
> Greg
>
> On 08/04/2004, at 7:23 AM, Mathieu Deschamps wrote:
> > I've found in OpenBios dev/bios a good reason to hope i could spare 
> > the
> > cost of a "physical" flashing device , and a ease using. That is to say
> > getting LinuxBios building the  .bin and flash the onboard BIOS via the
> > dev/bios mechanism.
> >
> > I have a via/epia and a SST39 series 20A (256Ko) bios chip on
> > I'd thought I could read/write this bios with cat my.bin >/dev/bios
> > but by insmoding bios.o. But i got a kmess coming from lines 123-126
> > printk code of bios.c
> >       "BIOS : No flash devices found"
> > This resulting in a console message "Device busy" (that is, though, a
> > bit paradoxal notfound != busy isn't it ? :) )
> >
> > I can't catch what have missed me... Is dev/bios couldn't be used in
> > my aim ?
> >
> > Gratefull if experienced people could help me.
> >  Cordialy.
> >
> > Mathieu
> > _______________________________________________
> > Linuxbios mailing list
> > [e-mail]
> > http://www.clustermatic.org/mailman/listinfo/linuxbios

[ron minnich]

On 13 Apr 2004, Mathieu Deschamps wrote:
> err :) well that's true ... I hope to have some help ...

it's a harder problem than it sounds. Did you try linuxbios flash_rom 
utility?

I agree it is elementary, and it is annoying, it's just that there are so 
many combinations of hardware out there that no one system supports them 
all.

ron

[Stefan Reinauer]

Hi,

* Mathieu Deschamps  [040408 15:23]:
> I've found in OpenBios dev/bios a good reason to hope i could spare the
> cost of a "physical" flashing device , and a ease using. That is to say
> getting LinuxBios building the  .bin and flash the onboard BIOS via the
> dev/bios mechanism.

I've been updating whole clusters in basically no time using /dev/bios,
but it has no proper error recovery nor does it work with recent kernels
(2.6) yet. The existing code should definitely be integrated into the
MTD (memory technology devices) code in the Linux kernel, or into the
userspace flash utilities available in LinuxBIOS.
> I have a via/epia and a SST39 series 20A (256Ko) bios chip on
> I'd thought I could read/write this bios with cat my.bin >/dev/bios
> but by insmoding bios.o. But i got a kmess coming from lines 123-126 
> printk code of bios.c 
>       "BIOS : No flash devices found" 
> This resulting in a console message "Device busy" (that is, though, a
> bit paradoxal notfound != busy isn't it ? :) )

Can you send an lspci and lspci -n output? The error messages were kind
of randomly chosen, just to keep the driver from loading if no flash
devices are available.
> I can't catch what have missed me... Is dev/bios couldn't be used in
> my aim ?

It is, it's just kind of an abandoned project, since it does not really
fit well to today's needs in flexibility and code reuse. Any patches,
hints, ideas are of course welcome.

Stefan