[flashrom] flashrom virtual machine policy?

[Carl-Daniel Hailfinger]

Am 27.06.2011 15:49 schrieb Bernd Blaauw:
> Op 27-6-2011 15:24, Jonathan A. Kollasch schreef:
>> Unless it's on a simulator like SimNow! where the flash chip may be
>> accurately emulated, flashrom will never detect a chip, and thus will be
>> as useful as it could possibly be in a emulator/virtual machine.
>>
>>> I've only got some experience with VMware Workstation and not much
>>> else with others, but how should a FlashROM that's being run in an
>>> emulator react?
>> Like it already does.
>
> Current behaviour is choking on chipset detection and bailing out if I
> remember correctly.
>
> I was under the assumption the goal of Flashrom is to be able to
> read/erase/write firmware whenever possible.
> On real machines the method is dealing with finding chipsets and eeproms.
> On virtual machines this method will fail, as will the goals of
> writing and erasing. However the goal of reading should still be
> possible, even though I admit there's little merit to it.

I think current qemu emulates a flash chip on x86. We should check if
flashrom detects anything. That said, for virtual hardware it should be
possible to check which flash chips are probed by flashrom, then select
one which is big enough for the BIOS of the virtual machine, and then
read the BIOS with
flashrom -f -r foo.bin -c whateverchip

Regards,
Carl-Daniel

-- 
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