[flashrom] verbose log of unsupported mainboard Foxconn Q45M

[Stefan Tauner]

On Thu, 20 Sep 2012 12:12:50 +0200
"Mendler, Marc (STL)" <Marc.Mendler at stala.bwl.de> wrote:

> Hi there,
> 
> we have a value of 150 machines with foxconn's Q45M. Last year we had to configure the bios settings of each machine by hand, because we were not able to deploy our bios settings
> to this mainboard in our standard way (boot via pxe, load a dos with a bios flash tool and an image of an configured bios and flash this image to the mainboard).
> Today i tried your flashrom tool (v0.9.5.2-r1515) build in parted magic but with no luck.
> I attached a verbose log of flashrom to this e-mail.
> 
> Keep up the good work!
> 

> 0x5C: 0x026f0020 FREG2: WARNING: Management Engine region (0x00020000-0x0026ffff) is locked.

Hello Marc,

thanks for your report!

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 complete solution soon.

I have added the board to our list of (un)supported boards (with an
appropriate note) and will commit that later together with other small
changes.

Normally the BIOS settings are not stored in the flash chip (but in
NVRAM), although there is nothing stopping firmware vendors doing so.
Usually flashing tools do not care about preserving, changing or
resetting NVRAM contents and they are reset by the firmware itself if
it detects a version mismatch on the first boot after the flashing.

If the configuration data is really stored in flash on this board, i
think the probability that they are stored in the platform region are
quite high.
> 0x64: 0x027f0270 FREG4: Platform Data region (0x00270000-0x0027ffff) is read-write.

If that is true and you are only interested in saving and deploying
this part, then we can supply you some patches and instructions for
doing so. Please note that it is also possible that there is something
completely different stored in there or a mix of configuration and e.g.
serial numbers etc.

If you want to use/try other tools, make sure that they support so
called "hardware sequencing" to access the flash chips, since this is a
hardware requirement on intel boards with two flash chips and the
"normal" access method called "software sequencing" would not be able
to access the second chip (which could lead to severe problems of
course).

-- 
Kind regards/Mit freundlichen Grüßen, Stefan Tauner