LinuxBios and Openbios's dev/bios capacity

Stefan Reinauer stepan at openbios.org
Tue Apr 13 07:58:00 CEST 2004


Hi,

* Mathieu Deschamps <mdeschamps at mangrove-systems.com> [040408 15:23]:
>  I've found in OpenBios dev/bios a good reason to hope i could spare the
> cost of a "physical" flashing device , and a ease using. That is to say
> getting LinuxBios building the  .bin and flash the onboard BIOS via the
> dev/bios mechanism.
 
I've been updating whole clusters in basically no time using /dev/bios,
but it has no proper error recovery nor does it work with recent kernels
(2.6) yet. The existing code should definitely be integrated into the
MTD (memory technology devices) code in the Linux kernel, or into the
userspace flash utilities available in LinuxBIOS.

>  I have a via/epia and a SST39 series 20A (256Ko) bios chip on
> I'd thought I could read/write this bios with cat my.bin >/dev/bios
> but by insmoding bios.o. But i got a kmess coming from lines 123-126 
> printk code of bios.c 
>       "BIOS : No flash devices found" 
> This resulting in a console message "Device busy" (that is, though, a
> bit paradoxal notfound != busy isn't it ? :) ) 

Can you send an lspci and lspci -n output? The error messages were kind
of randomly chosen, just to keep the driver from loading if no flash
devices are available.

>  I can't catch what have missed me... Is dev/bios couldn't be used in
> my aim ?

It is, it's just kind of an abandoned project, since it does not really
fit well to today's needs in flexibility and code reuse. Any patches,
hints, ideas are of course welcome.

Stefan





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