stock flashrom vs Google forked flashrom on a chromebook running "stock linux"?

[James Feeney]

When flashing the boot rom or the EC rom on, particularly, an Intel SOC chromebook, and running a "stock linux", instead of the original chromeos, is there any fundamental difference between the stock flashrom and the Google forked flashrom that would prevent the stock flashrom from working properly?

Thanks
James

[Edward O'Callaghan]

Hi James,

These differences are being actively worked on James. Although as you noted
there are some key areas of difference that are not easy to upstream as
they currently are.

I believe two key areas you may run into is lack of cros_ec support for
updating the EC and lack of a ignore_error feature in the cros tree for
dealing with the ME.
We would like to replace both of these mechanisms with a cleaner upstream
one however the effort needs to be resourced.

What was your specific problem?

Kind regards,
Edward.


On Thu, 1 Jul 2021 at 09:58, James Feeney <[e-mail]> wrote:
> When flashing the boot rom or the EC rom on, particularly, an Intel SOC
> chromebook, and running a "stock linux", instead of the original chromeos,
> is there any fundamental difference between the stock flashrom and the
> Google forked flashrom that would prevent the stock flashrom from working
> properly?
>
> Thanks
> James
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[James Feeney]

On 6/30/21 8:47 PM, Edward O'Callaghan via flashrom wrote:
> These differences are being actively worked on James. Although as you noted there are some key areas of difference that are not easy to upstream as they currently are.
>
> I believe two key areas you may run into is lack of cros_ec support for updating the EC and lack of a ignore_error feature in the cros tree for dealing with the ME.
> We would like to replace both of these mechanisms with a cleaner upstream one however the effort needs to be resourced.
>
> What was your specific problem?

Thanks Edward.  I am simply wondering if I will be able to 1) upgrade the chromebook EC firmware from "stock linux", without running chromeos, either using Google's flashrom, or with the stock flashrom, and similarly, 2) if I will be able to write the main flash using stock flashrom?  Or instead, should I simply use Google's flashrom fork?

For an Intel chromebook - geminilake - would I always be "safe" just compiling and using the Google flashrom from
 https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/third_party/flashrom/+/refs/hea...
without chromeos, instead of using stock flashrom?  There won't be any weird "write protect" problems?

James