Hi, I'm new to the list.
I've been playing with flashrom some, and it's great. Thanks for the work guys.
I've put a ZIF socket on a 3com NIC, for external programming. It seems to be working great. I've taken a picture, maybe it would be useful for the wiki or something.
I'm not a terribly good programmer, but I'm pretty good with hardware generally... I'm going to be doing some more hardware work in the future.
I think I'll make an ISA card with 32 and 28pin ZIF, and PLCC socket, on the 440BX board I have, addr is off the ISA bus, so I'll just buffer that. Data seems to go to the superIO chip, so I'll have to have a cheater socket under the stock BIOS ROM to steal /CS D0:7, etc. I think I'll buffer all the lines on the card, so that the bus doesn't get fried in case of a fried chip or whatnot. It will be a sort of general purpose flashing board. I think I'll try and implement support for the older 27xxx EPROMs at some point, which shouldn't be too difficult I don't think?
anyways, here's the picture if anyone wants it: http://electrontube.org/img/3com_prog.jpg
Mark
Hi Marko,
On 20.08.2009 01:12, Marko Kraljevic wrote:
Hi, I'm new to the list.
Welcome!
I've been playing with flashrom some, and it's great. Thanks for the work guys.
:-)
I've put a ZIF socket on a 3com NIC, for external programming. It seems to be working great. I've taken a picture, maybe it would be useful for the wiki or something.
Sure. Under what license is the picture? Public domain? CC-BY-SA? We need a separate wiki page about the 3com flasher once we have enough stuff for such a page.
I'm not a terribly good programmer, but I'm pretty good with hardware generally... I'm going to be doing some more hardware work in the future.
Great. We have quite a few interesting flashrom-related project ideas which require someone to be familiar with hardware.
I think I'll make an ISA card with 32 and 28pin ZIF, and PLCC socket, on the 440BX board I have, addr is off the ISA bus, so I'll just buffer that. Data seems to go to the superIO chip, so I'll have to have a cheater socket under the stock BIOS ROM to steal /CS D0:7, etc. I think I'll buffer all the lines on the card, so that the bus doesn't get fried in case of a fried chip or whatnot. It will be a sort of general purpose flashing board.
The big problem with this plan is that most PLCC chips use a completely different protocol (LPC/FWH) on the wire, so if you just have a few address and data lines, it will be very hard to impossible to support those chips without an extra translation chip. There are quite a few designs for LPC/FWH flashers out there and maybe you want to work with one of them. LPCflasher, LPC^2, Milksop, Paraflasher, ...
I think I'll try and implement support for the older 27xxx EPROMs at some point, which shouldn't be too difficult I don't think?
We may have to add a function in flashrom which raises the programming voltage to 12V for such old chips, but other than that, it should be doable.
anyways, here's the picture if anyone wants it: http://electrontube.org/img/3com_prog.jpg
Thanks. Once I know the license, I'll upload it to the wiki.
Regards, Carl-Daniel
Carl-Daniel Hailfinger wrote:
I've put a ZIF socket on a 3com NIC, for external programming. It seems to be working great. I've taken a picture, maybe it would be useful for the wiki or something.
Sure. Under what license is the picture? Public domain? CC-BY-SA? We need a separate wiki page about the 3com flasher once we have enough stuff for such a page.
CC-SA should be fine :-)
The big problem with this plan is that most PLCC chips use a completely different protocol (LPC/FWH) on the wire, so if you just have a few address and data lines, it will be very hard to impossible to support those chips without an extra translation chip. There are quite a few designs for LPC/FWH flashers out there and maybe you want to work with one of them. LPCflasher, LPC^2, Milksop, Paraflasher, ...
Almost all the chips I have handy are DIP anyways, and most of the PLCC ones I have around are just PLCC versions of standard parallel flash, as far as I remember, 28/29Fxxx stuff.
What numbers do FWH/LPC chips tend to start with? I've read about LPC some, a long time ago, but I need to read some more!
We may have to add a function in flashrom which raises the programming voltage to 12V for such old chips, but other than that, it should be doable.
That was my line of thought too. I'll have to play with eventually.
Mark
PS - do any newer motherboards use I2C flash? or is SPI the only serial implementation used?
On 20.08.2009 13:05, Marko Kraljevic wrote:
Carl-Daniel Hailfinger wrote:
I've put a ZIF socket on a 3com NIC, for external programming. It seems to be working great. I've taken a picture, maybe it would be useful for the wiki or something.
Sure. Under what license is the picture? Public domain? CC-BY-SA? We need a separate wiki page about the 3com flasher once we have enough stuff for such a page.
CC-SA should be fine :-)
Thanks, uploaded to the wiki and included in a separate page about 3Com flashers http://www.coreboot.org/Flashrom/NIC3Com which is linked from http://www.coreboot.org/Flashrom#3Com_Network_cards . Maybe Uwe or somebody else wants to fill in more info about nic3com.
Almost all the chips I have handy are DIP anyways, and most of the PLCC ones I have around are just PLCC versions of standard parallel flash, as far as I remember, 28/29Fxxx stuff.
What numbers do FWH/LPC chips tend to start with?
39/49/50 with 49 being the most common. I've seen 39/49 chips which are parallel but that's ususual. 50 is not very common as model number.
I've read about LPC some, a long time ago, but I need to read some more!
http://www.coreboot.org/Flashrom has a few notes about LPC/FWH.
We may have to add a function in flashrom which raises the programming voltage to 12V for such old chips, but other than that, it should be doable.
That was my line of thought too. I'll have to play with eventually.
If you do, please make sure to discuss such changes in advance on this list so we can work together for the best possible design.
PS - do any newer motherboards use I2C flash? or is SPI the only serial implementation used?
I haven't seen any x86 boards with I2C flash except for MAC address storage and similar purposes, and these flashes are usually very small (less than 1k).
Regards, Carl-Daniel
-
Carl-Daniel Hailfinger -
Marko Kraljevic