[coreboot] Burn 2MB coreboot.rom on 8MB flash chip

Nico Huber nico.h at gmx.de
Sat Oct 6 12:15:58 CEST 2018


Hi Zvi,

On 10/5/18 8:46 PM, Zvi Vered wrote:
> According to the help of flashrom, it works with bin files only.
> So I should take coreboot.rom and stitch it to the parts of the original
> vendor's bin file.

there is no standard for neither .bin nor .rom files. Most often these
file-name extensions just mean the file contains raw data.

If any program implies a special meaning to .rom or .bin, then that
meaning is vendor specific.

So to flashrom, .rom and .bin is the same. Flashrom doesn't look at the
file contents at all. It just copies them to the flash chip (much like
the `dd` command copies file contents no matter what they are).

If you tell flashrom to write a complete file that doesn't contain a
firmware descriptor, then the system can't boot anymore. But if you have
a descriptor and other required firmware parts in the flash already, you
can tell flashrom to only flash the BIOS region, e.g.:

  # flashrom -p ... --ifd -i bios -w coreboot.rom

This is just more convenient and reliable than stitching files (but the
result should be the same).

Nico



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