On Thu, 08 Mar 2012 09:24:33 -0500 Mark Brown mbrown@greenmountainservices.com wrote:
Wonder if there is a way to support the RTL8169 chipset, for SPI based programming. Very common and inexpensive card.
we have an untested (probably outdated) patch for it: http://patchwork.coreboot.org/patch/2489/ the problem is, that there are multiple versions of the chipset. the earlier revision(s?) have a square package and would support reading and writing to the flash (and eeprom) chip. the latter and by far more common version of the chipset does no longer support writing to the flash chip. if your card(s) have a square RTL8169 chip then i can update the patch for you to try.
Would be wonderful to support something like gPXE/iPXE PXE ROMs on those NICs. The typical 128kbit SPI rom/eprom/prom variations are often ATMEL or like. e.f. ATMEL518 93C64
please note that the chips with "93" in the name like above are eeproms which are not supported at all by flashrom (please see http://flashrom.org/Supported_hardware#Supported_chips to get a general idea what series of memory devices can (easily) be supported).