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

[Carl-Daniel Hailfinger]

Hi,

On 17.05.2010 18:27, Jörg Fischer wrote:
> 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.
>   

Ouch. Not really a good way to use the cards as programmers.


> 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.
>   

Working ID and working erase, only with failing erase test? We had such
issues on multiple programmers, and it turned out that the timing in
flashrom was broken for the affected flash chips. This has since been
fixed, so maybe your code now works fine?


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

IMHO any code which can at least get chip IDs is good enough to get
merged (disabled by default until all issues are fixed). That will allow
others to hack on the code and makes sure the code is not forgotten.
Could you please resend it as a complete patch with a Signed-off-by line?


Regards,
Carl-Daniel

-- 
http://www.hailfinger.org/