On 08.01.2010 18:06, ron minnich wrote:
On Fri, Jan 8, 2010 at 8:32 AM, Adrian Glaubitz wrote
IIRC the newer Dell OptiPlex series have a special way for flashing the BIOS. You use a Dell-provided utility to copy the new BIOS image into a special (non-volatile?) memory, then reboot the machine. Once it reboots, it will automatically start to flash.
wow, how ... special. So you have no visibility into the reflash process and no idea of its progress.
I think the special Dell stuff has existed for years. Back then, they probably didn't know (or didn't care) about flashrom, and nowadays this flashing procedure is actually a reliability advantage over the alternative: Windows flashers. Flashing from a multitasking OS (especially if not done as kernel driver) means there are no guarantees whatsoever about timing, reliability, crash resistance and other stuff you'd care about. You can find boatloads of reports from people who bricked their machines by flashing under Windows, and because people are too unskilled (or unwilling) to run DOS based flashers, it all burns down to doing the reflashing from the BIOS.
This is the default mode for many new BIOSes, I understand, since so many of them are EFI at the core. It's not an improvement for the customer, but it's what the vendors are going to provide. It's very disappointing.
I think this is only somewhat related to EFI (first time you can easily add executables to the BIOS). Most of it is about reliability concerns. And if you look at vendors like Sun, it seems there is an unwillingness to perform host-based flashing at all, instead they opt to run the reflashing process from the Management Engine.
I see a flashrom driver for such Management Engines on the horizon (unless they are not providing direct hardware access), but since I don't own the hardware, this is pretty low priority for me.
Now if we could motivate at least one board vendor to ship (or offer for download) flashrom CDs for reflashing their boards, we'd win big time.
Regards, Carl-Daniel