common flash hw write enable methods

[Gregg C Levine]

Hello from Gregg C Levine
Pardon me Andrew? It happens that I got the thing to work. This was in
1.4.1 and under Linux, Slackware Linux 8.0 if you're curious. I simply
plugged the file that you made into the space provided, and adjusted the
rest of the settings to match. If you mean that the elf boot program
that everyone is proud of, and rightfully so, does not work under Bochs,
I'll agree. I tabled it, because I could not figure out a way to make it
work. I figured correctly that I'd need to make a port to a particular
motherboard to make it work for me. Oh, and what did you mean? Anyway.
-------------------
Gregg C Levine hansolofalcon at worldnet.att.net
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> -----Original Message-----
> From: linuxbios-admin at clustermatic.org [mailto:linuxbios-
> admin at clustermatic.org] On Behalf Of Andrew Kohlsmith
> Sent: Wednesday, December 04, 2002 9:36 AM
> To: linuxbios at clustermatic.org
> Subject: Re: common flash hw write enable methods
> 
> > It doesn't. Basically most flasher programs use some kind of data
> > structure the look for in the bios memory, that contains pointers to
> > functions like "map flash to memory", "disable write protection",
etc.
> > This is at least the case with AMI and Award, probably Phoenix as
well.
> > These are 16bit calls, which makes it kind of hard/impossible to
really
> > use directly. It's possible to search for this structure and look at
> > the code. However, this is likely to be illegal in many countries.
> 
> Not in Canada.  :-)
> 
> Yeah this does sound kind of ugly.  Especially since the Orasis BIOS
won't
> boot up in Bochs, as it seems to end up hanging due to some PIT
simulator
> inconsistencies.
> 
> > Especially after the first non-vendor-written flashers appeared,
many
> > people were scared of viruses destroying the flash data and such.
> > Security by obscurity...
> 
> Well, if worse comes to worst I can just cut the trace and wire those
pins to
> +12.  The datasheet for the chip says that it operates normally under
those
> circumstances, except that all "soft" boot block protection is
disabled.
> 
> Regards,
> Andrew
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