On Tue, 13 Dec 2016 23:50:24 +0100 Antonio sitadt11@gmail.com wrote:
Hello everyone!
I would like to get a BIOS dump from my tablet for analysis purposes.
I read that laptops are not supported by Flashrom, so tablets should be even less so.
However I can't seem to understand if this limitation only applies to writing or reading as well.
Could anybody shed some light? Could I use the following without bricking my device? flashrom -p internal -r backup.bin
I'm ok if it crashes, just don't want to brick the tablet.
For further reference it's a BayTrail tablet with an Insyde UEFI BIOS
Hello Antonio,
basically it applies even to probing for the flash chip because in some weird (but today almost instinct) configurations flashrom cannot talk as direct to the flash chip as I would deem normal. In these cases there is a bridge (EC) that converts the commands sent by flashrom via LPC and conveys them over the native flash chip bus (SPI usually). This conversion chip might react very weirdly to some commands it does not understand that flashrom sends to interact with flash chips the EC does not even know about. Because the EC is also responsible for power management and similarly delicate stuff we do not recommend to run flashrom on any laptop that is not guaranteed to NOT have this configuration. However, as I said, these configurations are less common today and even less on Intel platforms - so Bay Trail should be completely safe to read out. However, you may not succeed anyway - i.e. read might not work. But you can try and report back of course.