Re: [LinuxBIOS] flashrom: Doesn't seem to be able to write on ICH-2 (maybe other ICH-x) mainboards
Hello Uwe, I have recently tried to use flashrom on two different ICH-6 based motherboards. As described in your original posting, detection and reading of the chips works. Each of the boards I've worked with (ASUS P5GD2-X, ASUS P5GD1-VM) use a winbond W83627EHF chip to communicate with the flash chip. I have not attempted to use uniflash on these boards for two reasons: A) the winbond chips supported (by uniflash) are not register compatible and do not use exactly the same communication scheme as the W83627EHF/W83627EHG chips. B) the chipset enabling code seems to perform the same operation with the exception of not poking at the firmware hub decode enable register (uniflash seems to do this, though my pascal is shaky). I've been poking at the winbond chip and though I've sucessfully gotten it to hide the flash chip, I have yet to figure out what bit I'm forgetting to flip to allow writes to ROM.
In reference to: http://www.linuxbios.org/pipermail/linuxbios/2006-October/016087.html http://tracker.linuxbios.org/trac/LinuxBIOS/ticket/7
-mark milburn
mmilburn@nmt.edu wrote:
Hello Uwe, I have recently tried to use flashrom on two different ICH-6 based motherboards. As described in your original posting, detection and reading of the chips works. Each of the boards I've worked with (ASUS P5GD2-X, ASUS P5GD1-VM) use a winbond W83627EHF chip to communicate with the flash chip. I have not attempted to use uniflash on these boards for two reasons: A) the winbond chips supported (by uniflash) are not register compatible and do not use exactly the same communication scheme as the W83627EHF/W83627EHG chips.
This does not necessarily mean uniflash won't work. I'd try it before discounting it entirely (uniflash is magic ;-) ). And if worst comes to worst, asus's flash utility should work as well.
B) the chipset enabling code seems to perform the same operation with the exception of not poking at the firmware hub decode enable register (uniflash seems to do this, though my pascal is shaky). I've been poking at the winbond chip and though I've sucessfully gotten it to hide the flash chip, I have yet to figure out what bit I'm forgetting to flip to allow writes to ROM.
In reference to: http://www.linuxbios.org/pipermail/linuxbios/2006-October/016087.html http://tracker.linuxbios.org/trac/LinuxBIOS/ticket/7
I'll have a peak at the ICH issues in the next few days, although I only have ICH and ICH7 to test on (and I see you're using ICH6/6R). However, it wouldn't surprise me to find out that the actual cause of your issues is a lock put in place by the factory BIOS, Asus does this on a lot of their boards, but uniflash knows how to work around it. Luc Verhaegen's done quite a bit of work working around these with flashrom (see the board specific fixups and this email: http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.bios/24184 ), but he's pretty tied up at the moment.
-Corey
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Corey Osgood -
mmilburn＠nmt.edu