flashrom

flashrom@flashrom.org

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9188 discussions

Successfully read an XM25QH256C with a CH341a based programmer.
by James Russell 01 Mar '23

01 Mar '23

Hi, I just did a backup of the BIOS chip of a new laptop I got. in case something happened to be able to restore it all to sane defaults. Freshly built Flashrom snapshot on a live Arch (Manjaro) environment, the chip is an XM25QH256C[XIQ] in a WSON8 package (6x8), I didn't want to desolder the chip and I noticed some exposed solder where the contacts would be so I did the dump using a pogo pin contraption attached to the CH341a. It is an old programmer I've had for years (I don't think there's any cheap-ish alternative using at least USB 2.0 that is supported by Flashrom, so... it was slow), both Vcc and the data lines ran at 3.3-ish volts. After the message that appeared during the read I thought "damn, I didn't enable verbose output nor was I logging the operation", so I did a verify operation afterwards which is essentially the same. Log is attached and if you need the contents of the ROM I can attach them too (32MiB). I didn't do much in-depth analysis of the ROM but it seems correct, at least I can see UEFI and ME structures in there. Sadly, I don't plan on writing to that chip anytime soon, at least not until I get a replacement because the setup is not very stable and I don't want to risk the connection getting interrupted. These XMC chips are hard to come by in my area, but Mouser sells an equivalent Winbond that is also supported and is greenlit to be used in this laptop; so I had ordered one of those to have at hand. Anyway, I digress haha, you have the Verify log attached to this email (I thought there'd be more data there). Regards, James. PS. I think it's not implemented, but perhaps adding a progress indicator (since the flash chip's size is known) to read/write operations would be handy, if it weren't for an indicator LED on my programmer board I wouldn't really know if it was progressing or not.

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Fwd: Flashrom experimental chip support report
by Sadoon Albader 28 Feb '23

28 Feb '23

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First release candidate for 1.3 is tagged as v1.3.0-rc1
by Anastasia Klimchuk 27 Feb '23

27 Feb '23

Hello fashrom community, Great news! As subject says: first release candidate for 1.3 is tagged as v1.3.0-rc1 The main thing that will be happening with RC1 now is testing. Few notes about testing and/or using flashrom built from v1.3.0-rc1. If you are a flashrom user who has never built flashrom from source code, and always used a packaged release version, please continue doing so for now. Release candidate is not a release yet, it is possible some bugs will be found in RC1 and we will have RC2 to fix those. Watch the mailing list for further announcements. If you are a developer and building flashrom from source is an acceptable level of risk for you (because you've done that before, tried new features from head before, have been developing / testing your own patches, or tried / tested patches from other people in community), then please feel free to use v1.3.0-rc1. Your help with testing and reporting bugs is highly appreciated! No test case is too small: even if you can run one specific scenario, it is an important contribution, and yes it helps! A special case of the above: if you are a developer and work in a company that is using flashrom: if you could contribute to testing v1.3.0-rc1 that would be really great! Perhaps (that's me "thinking aloud") it is possible to point an automated tests suite to v1.3.0-rc1 and run the tests? How to report a bug or successful testing: there are few options. First option is to post on the mailing list (feel free to reply on this thread, or create a new thread). Second option is to add a comment to a ticket "Testing for release v1.3" https://ticket.coreboot.org/issues/378. This would require an account in bugtracker (coreboot account is fine). Thirdly, of course, you can fix a bug and send a patch! :) Please set a topic "for_1.3.x" And finally, What's new since 1.2? We've done ~1000 commits in ~3 years! The full exact list of "what's new" is under construction, will be ready later :) Meanwhile, here is a very high-level unordered overview: meson support expanded, and documentation is added build systems improvements, for both of them new programmers added new chips added unit tests misc cleanups / refactorings removing global state / fixing memory leaks write-protect and write-protect emulation in dummyflasher MAINTAINERS file build script for jenkins upgraded flashrom_tester improvements manpage grew more info ... Two features dropped from release: promontory support displaying progress in libflashrom operations Due to the bugs that won't be possible to fix/test in time for 1.3. Bug-fixes are planned for the release after (1.3+1). Thanks heaps everyone, for testing, using flashrom, and supporting the release process in any other way! It is so much appreciated. Happy holidays to everyone! -- Anastasia.

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-VV dump from an FM25Q128A
by Michael Colton 24 Feb '23

24 Feb '23

Love this tool! Thanks for your work! Here's the output from this chip, as requested. -Michael

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build automation tool
by Prakhar Agrawal 23 Feb '23

23 Feb '23

Hello, I was going through the GitHub repo of flashrom, and I saw some files outside the folders. Do you think it will be a good idea to organise the files in the directory and use a build automation tool like waf,cmake or maybe bazel to auto-generate Makefiles. It can also be used to create and link shared libraries easily. Looking forward to your opinions. Best Regards Prakhar

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manpage and documentation
by Thomas Heijligen 23 Feb '23

23 Feb '23

Hi flashromers, For all the time I'm now working on flashrom I've avoided to touch the man-page. The reason: it is written in plain groff (the manpage format), which is, IMO, neither great to read in source nor makes it fun to edit. Nowadays there are a lot of tools for converting a source readable format like md or rst into groff / man-pages. So I've played around with some and found a solution with `Sphinx`[0] that might fit flashrom well. Sphinx is well known in the Open Source Community for project documentation. Coreboot, the Linux kernel and many other projects are using it already. So it is time tested and nothing really new. Beside rendering to html sides, sphinx is also capable to render groff/manpages which is quite nice. My reason for choosing sphinx over other tools was: - It is known to many people - reStructuredText is easy to read and write - It can produce groff/manpages *and* html without plugins/extensions/quirks - It is, like our meson based build system, written in python. So it runs where the build system runs and has no additional software stack like nodejs or ruby on rails - It is extendable to our needs (e.g. generate documentation from data with python) The conversion of the manpage from groff to sphinx/rst can be found here: https://review.coreboot.org/c/flashrom/+/72619 Going forward I would also like to suggest integrating the existing documentation of the Wiki to Sphinx (flashrom source / Gerrit) and supersede the current homepage with it. What do you think about this? -- Thomas [0] https://www.sphinx-doc.org/en/master/

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flashrom dev meeting notes 22.02.2023
by Anastasia Klimchuk 22 Feb '23

22 Feb '23

# 22th February 2023, 21:00 - 22:00 UTC+0 Attendees: Thomas, Stefan, Prakhar, Anastasia ## Decision summary * New flashrom home page generated with sphinx coming soon. And then we eventually move relevant content from wiki and deprecate wiki. Details below in notes. * We will have two release windows per year: one in spring/autumn and one in autumn/spring. For this year, we are trying the approach, planned windows are end of April-May and end of September-October. The size of a window is 3-4 weeks, during that time we have feature freeze and only bugfixing. At the end of the window, tag the release and create the release branch. ## Agenda * Patches to support Power PC coming, Stefan will help with testing * [quasisec] [https://review.coreboot.org/c/flashrom/+/70264](https://review.coreboot.org… needs attention. Same for [https://review.coreboot.org/c/flashrom/+/67481](https://review.coreboot.org… and [https://review.coreboot.org/c/flashrom/+/67480/](https://review.coreboot.or… * It would be good to trim the tree’s verbosity down more and make things more consistent too. * Seems all good, TODO Thomas will have a look and also approve. Patches need to be rebased, hopefully for the last time. * [quasisec] [https://review.coreboot.org/q/topic:gsoc](https://review.coreboot.org/q/top… needs help from the community as a whole to help light get his work merged. I did quite a bit of patch review but more help is needed. GSoC work shouldn’t be left endlessly in review with an all or nothing approach. * As of today, this is merged. * Announcement to the mailing list coming soon (TODO Aarya) * [quasisec] new flashrom website, what is the timeline to get it up and running? It has been half a year since we confirmed the objective to do it. * Home page now can be generated with sphinx * [https://review.coreboot.org/c/flashrom/+/72619](https://review.coreboot.org… * The Plan * Sphinx patch needs to be merged * Build instructions integrated into sphinx, as a separate page * README context needs to be upgraded, as a landing page * Create CI to render sphinx to subdomain. Subdomain could be for the first few iterations for testing. Could be new.flashrom.org * Switch new page to flashrom.org, old stuff goes to wiki.flashrom.org * Migrate pages one-by-one * Eventually deprecate wiki * [aklm] let's decide when do we do 1.4? 1-2 months window maybe, some time later this year? * Maybe we decide on a window for each year, and stick to that? Two windows, even better. If necessary, point releases in between. * We can have two releases per year: one in spring, one in autumn. Below is suggested plan: * Next window is at the end of April-May. We can tag rc1 on 17th or 24th April, and for the following 4 weeks we have feature freeze, but actively bugfixing. * Every week we tag rc+1. * After 3-4 weeks we tag a release. At this point make a branch. * If something is discovered to be unfixable in this time, and no one is interested to fix, revert it. * Second window could be around the end September - October (exact dates TBD later). -- Anastasia.

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flashrom dev meeting notes 08.02.2023
by Anastasia Klimchuk 22 Feb '23

22 Feb '23

Apologies for the delay, these are notes from two weeks ago. # 8th February 2023, 21:00 - 22:00 UTC+0 Attendees: Thomas, Stefan, Prakhar, Anastasia ## Decision summary * Few upgrades for Easy Projects page (TODO aklm) ## Agenda * [aklm] Easy Projects page needs some love. * How about “Write a unit test” as an easy project? -> aklm will add on wiki * Thomas: we can have a topic for easy projects, and contributors can look for existing patches for a topic. For every section in easy projects a separate topic, for example “easy_project_scan_build”, “easy_project_unit_test”. * Maybe a small guide how to set a topic in gerrit * One more section: link to bug tracker with Easy Projects category of bugs. * Thomas: after removing the makefile, let’s make more targets default. Debug build can have everything. At the moment build options are the same, but after dropping makefile we can set meson default options * Thomas: Use meson subprojects for dependencies on cross compile targets * Convert README to restructured text as in the patch [https://review.coreboot.org/c/flashrom/+/72619/](https://review.coreboot.or… -- Anastasia.

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flashrom release v1.3.0 is out
by Anastasia Klimchuk 08 Feb '23

08 Feb '23

Good Day flashrom community, flashrom release v1.3.0 is out! Tag name: v1.3.0 Branch name: 1.3.x Tarball: download.flashrom.org/releases/flashrom-v1.3.0.tar.bz2 Signature: download.flashrom.org/releases/flashrom-v1.3.0.tar.bz2.asc Fingerprint: 6E6E F9A0 BA47 8006 E277 6E4C C037 BB41 3134 D111 I will create a new page on the website for 1.3.0 very soon (will respond to this thread with a link). Main reason why it will take some extra time to create a page is because I need to try and list all important changes since v1.2 which was 3 years ago. There is a high-level overview of changes in the earlier announcement about the first release candidate for 1.3, but I am hoping to create a more detailed list for the website page. Many thanks to everyone who contributed to the release: testing flashrom, sending and reviewing patches, discussing and triaging bugs, branching and tagging, signing and uploading the tarball, and supporting each other along the way. 1.3 has happened because we did it together as a cool team! -- Anastasia.

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wbsio_spi.c / Intel D201GLY
by Edward O'Callaghan 06 Feb '23

06 Feb '23

G'day flashrom'ers, Does anyone use or still need the wbsio spi path specifically used for the Intel D201GLY board? I wish to remove this code https://review.coreboot.org/c/flashrom/+/72828 if at all possible. The reasoning is that a lot of board_enable changes would be required to allow for the drivers entry-point to be passed configuration and other data. The driver is a single exception to every other driver in the tree that either has a direct driver entry from the driver table (programmer_table) or via the specalised "internal" programmer that directs entry via a chipset_enable dispatch. It would be preferably for board_enable not to have a deep CFG going right though it to driver entry-points for one very specific case especially if the driver isn't even used anymore? Interested to hear your thoughts or users? Cheers, Edward.

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