Hello Stefan,
Thursday, September 20, 2012, 10:50:39 PM, you wrote:
That is a pure guess based on no evidence, AFAICT. It is quite easy to find the UEFI variables in the flash image, once it has been read out, as the variable names are there in ASCII for those variables that have been set to non-default values.
ST> Right. And the Q45M seems to use UEFI. ST> In that case the locked ME firmware remains the major obstacle, because ST> we still don't know if the ME requires to be updated together with the ST> BIOS region *in general*.
No, ME is very rarely (never?) updated together with the BIOS; usually it's either a separate update (using Intel's FWUpdLcl.exe and a specially-packaged ME image) or another elaborate step (e.g. MSI P67A-G43 ME7 to ME8 update involves an EFI module inside the BIOS).
ST> In the case of the Q45M, the latest firmware update archive contains ST> different binaries: (presumably) image of the whole flash space, images ST> for each flash chip, and one image for the BIOS region only. ST> The interesting bit is that the batch file included uses only the latter ST> to write to the BIOS region. So i think it is safe to assume, that ST> updating that region only is ok, which makes flashrom (including my ST> layout patches) suitable for the job of reading the (updated, and ST> configured) region out and deploying it on the other machines.
I think it makes sense to just update the BIOS region for the descriptor-based flashes; AFAIK that's what all other tools do.
Another good feature would be to detect the NVAR partition and skip it when flashing.