Re: [flashrom] IBM SurePOS 700 4800-783 support

Sorry if this is a flashrom noob question.  But I want to make sure that I 
understand correctly what your saying.

It sounds like this Renesas H8S2116 controller is something that nobody on 
the flashrom dev team has worked on yet?
> From reading your very fine and very detailed web site (congrats on that

BTW), specifically the section on adding support for laptops "
http://www.flashrom.org/Laptops" it sounds like a little bit of a 
challenge to add support for a new chipset like this?  Is that a correct 
assumption on my part?

We've spoken with IBM and of course all of their current stuff is DOS 
based / bootable from USB key.  Of course for a fee they would be willing 
to help us out and develop a Linux based program to update the BIOS.....

Does anyone have thoughts on how much time and effort it would take to do 
this?  IBM is hardly ever the cheapest solution, so I'm guessing we would 
more likely find a more reasonable price from the Open Source 
community....

Thanks again for your assistance.

Jason Vannest
Information Technology - Store Systems
Abercrombie & Fitch
614-283-6363 (desk)

From:
Idwer Vollering 
To:
[e-mail], 
Cc:
[e-mail]
Date:
07/10/2012 04:52 PM
Subject:
Re: [flashrom] IBM SurePOS 700 4800-783 support

2012/7/10 
Output from "./flashrom -V -p internal:laptop=this_is_not_a_laptop "

flashrom v0.9.5.2-r1515 on Linux 2.6.32.12-0.7-default (i686), built with 
libpci 3.1.7, GCC 4.5.1 20101208 [gcc-4_5-branch revision 167585], little 
endian 
flashrom is free software, get the source code at http://www.flashrom.org

Calibrating delay loop... OS timer resolution is 1 usecs, 1774M loops per 
second, 10 myus = 10 us, 100 myus = 102 us, 1000 myus = 1009 us, 10000 
myus = 9982 us, 4 myus = 5 us, OK. 
Initializing internal programmer 
No coreboot table found. 
DMI string system-manufacturer: "IBM CORPORATION" 
DMI string system-product-name: "4800783" 
DMI string system-version: "4800783" 
DMI string baseboard-manufacturer: "IBM CORPORATION" 
DMI string baseboard-product-name: "P4M900/VT8251/DME1737" 
DMI string baseboard-version: "<BAD INDEX>" 
DMI string chassis-type: "" 
DMI chassis-type is not specific enough. 
The following protocols are supported: Non-SPI.

So the chipset in your POS machine is, at the moment, not recognized by 
flashrom.

No EEPROM/flash device found. 
Note: flashrom can never write if the flash chip isn't found 
automatically.

According to this IBM web page [1] there is a "Service Processor Renesas 
H8S2116" [2] present.

[1] http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=pos1R1003969
[2] 
http://documentation.renesas.com/doc/products/mpumcu/rej09b0255_h8s2116hm.pd...