Thanks for flashrom! It enabled me to fix some problems I was having without buying a copy of Windows. Diagnostics for this board attached.
Say, MSI BIOS updating is a mess. MSI provides a Windows-only tool, the users on their forum have made a bootable-USB builder (Windows-only) which installs a flash tool, and MSI endorses that, but the users say to never use the flash tool that MSI distributes. Worse yet, MSI no longer distributes flash images via their website - they want you to update with their Windows tool (apparently one can e-mail support for a copy of the flash images; I just grabbed a final beta from the forum as I had limited time). The forum-users' tool apparently (from screenshots) can also download the flash images from MSI (with versioning, so one can downgrade).
Anyway, that's quite a bit of background to ask if it anybody has discussed adding vendor-specific handlers/plugins to qflashrom. If that's desirable the logic for MSI could probably be ported over from the Windows tool. The flashrom LiveCD would be tremendously useful for folks in the field with this sort of capability.
-Bill
On Thu, 13 Oct 2011 14:11:18 -0400 Bill McGonigle bill@bfccomputing.com wrote:
Thanks for flashrom! It enabled me to fix some problems I was having without buying a copy of Windows. Diagnostics for this board attached.
Say, MSI BIOS updating is a mess. MSI provides a Windows-only tool, the users on their forum have made a bootable-USB builder (Windows-only) which installs a flash tool, and MSI endorses that, but the users say to never use the flash tool that MSI distributes. Worse yet, MSI no longer distributes flash images via their website - they want you to update with their Windows tool (apparently one can e-mail support for a copy of the flash images; I just grabbed a final beta from the forum as I had limited time). The forum-users' tool apparently (from screenshots) can also download the flash images from MSI (with versioning, so one can downgrade).
Anyway, that's quite a bit of background to ask if it anybody has discussed adding vendor-specific handlers/plugins to qflashrom. If that's desirable the logic for MSI could probably be ported over from the Windows tool. The flashrom LiveCD would be tremendously useful for folks in the field with this sort of capability.
-Bill
Hello Bill,
Thanks for your report! I have marked the board as supported and will commit that later together with other small changes.
Regarding the limitation of downloads at the MSI site: interesting news. Google still finds some download links, and the user tool probably just generates similar links as: http://download1.msi.com/files/downloads/bos_exe/7696v13.zip I agree that having such a (semi-automatic) way to update the firmware of a mainboard would be a nice thing, but OTOH someone has to dedicate lots of time to create and maintain such a plugin because URLs change a lot. We notice that all the time for the product pages because we (used to) link to them from http://www.flashrom.org/Supported_hardware. Besides, there are enough other open problems that are more important to address than downloading and extracting a zip for the user. ;)
-
Bill McGonigle -
Stefan Tauner