[LinuxBIOS] [anton.borisov at gmail.com: Re: ICH7DH: flash_enable failed]

[Peter Stuge]

On Sat, Mar 31, 2007 at 01:19:33AM +0200, Stefan Reinauer wrote:
> > P.S. Flash chip is *infamous* SST25LF080A :-)
> 
> Ah, flashrom of course does not support SPI chips.

It also does not support any southbridge SPI masters.


On Sat, Mar 31, 2007 at 01:55:54AM +0200, Stefan Reinauer wrote:
> > 	Yep. Solutions / ideas?
> 
> gotta love git and its urls
> 
> http://dev.laptop.org/git?p=projects/olpcflash;a=blob;h=73331cd596e639da72299ca51455d00664e78ce5;hb=99daa9a96dd66781efbb50f22cac189e23ceba8a;f=olpcflash.c

On Sat, Mar 31, 2007 at 01:56:32AM +0200, Carl-Daniel Hailfinger wrote:
> olpcflash should work.

No, it shouldn't.

olpcflash is an OLPC-specific tool that programs an SPI flash rom
through the embedded controller on the OLPC.

On other boards, this is done by the southbridge. See chapter 5 and
21 in the ICH7 datasheet for example.

There are many lockdown mechanisms in the ICH7. If any of them is
enabled by the default system BIOS, it will not be possible for
flashrom to reprogram an SPI flash chip. But then it will also not
be possible for any Intel software to do so. Hopefully that's not
commonly done.


The solution is to implement SPI master support in flashrom for the
needed southbridge. It would be nice if flashrom could identify a
particular board model (Luc's patches, right?) so that SPI can be
auto-selected, but flashrom could also first try LPC/parallell write
and if that doesn't work try SPI, or worst case require the user to
enable SPI programming.

I estimate adding this SPI support is a day or two's worth of
hacking. A board is needed to test. (Mostly to learn if and how the
SPI master has been locked down by the factory BIOS.)


//Peter