[flashrom] [PROPOSAL] support for NIC RTL8139 onboard flashing

[Jörg Fischer]

Hi,
Guenter schrieb:

> a lot of Realtek RTL8139 NICs have a DIL-32 bootrom socket, and it is
> possible from DOS to flash PXE bootcode directly onboard provided you
> use ATMEL AT29C512 or AT29C010A flashs; here's the download of the
> Realtek flash program (see DOS section):

Many cards tie the "write enable" Pin to its logic "not enabled" state
instead of connecting to the chip, so flash writes are impossible on
_most_ card types I came across. YMMV.

> http://www.realtek.com.tw/downloads/downloadsView.aspx?Langid=1&PNid=6&PFid=6&Level=5&Conn=4&DownTypeID=3&GetDown=false
> 
> unfortunately Realtek's flash utility only supports ATMEL flashs, and
> even more worse is the trap that you can only flash the chip if it is
> detected by the BIOS - if you just insert an empty chip then it didnt
> work for me; the chip needs at least the 55AA code at the beginning so
> that its memory is mapped into adapter space by the MB BIOS.
> Do you think that it is possible to add support for flashing these cards
> (omst likely the RTL8169 GB NICs work same) to flashrom?

RTL8169 uses different addresses IIRC. Same problem with hard wired
Write Enable pin - see above.

I have still some not-really-working code from my earlier experiments. I
 could read the chip-id and erase the chip - but the erase test failed
afterwards, though the cips' contents seemed to be all 0xFF.

If you are still interested: The attached .c file contains details on
how to talk to the flash chip on RTL 8139 NIC.

-- J. Fischer
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