[flashrom] undetected Intel X79 (8086:1d41) flash chip

[Stefan Tauner]

On Wed, 10 Oct 2012 13:26:09 +0300
Alexey Dobriyan <adobriyan at gmail.com> wrote:

> > The problem is the locked ME region as quoted above. We are working on
> > unlocking it, but intel does not provide us any documentation so please
> > do not expect a solution soon.
> >
> > Can you please tell us which Supermicro board that is so that i can add
> > it to our list of unsupported boards in the meantime?  
> 
> I can't, it's a custom(?) board with DMI info et al stripped and replaced.

OK

> Why this ME region is important? It doesn't overlap with BIOS region.
> 
>     Alexey, who know approximately nothing about BIOS internals

The ME region contains the firmware for an embedded controller (EC) in
the chipset. It is used for fan control and a number of other things and
also has access to basically everything the CPU has access to. The
interaction between the BIOS with this EC is not documented and it is
theoretically possible that updating the BIOS alone without updating
the ME firmware before would brick the PC. Flashrom plays safe and
disables writes if it detects that we can not write to the ME region.
-- 
Kind regards/Mit freundlichen Grüßen, Stefan Tauner