[flashrom] verbose log of unsupported mainboard Foxconn Q45M

[roxfan]

Hello Stefan,

Thursday, September 20, 2012, 10:50:39 PM, you wrote:

>> That is a pure guess based on no evidence, AFAICT. It is quite easy to
>> find the UEFI variables in the flash image, once it has been read out, 
>> as the variable names are there in ASCII for those variables that have 
>> been set to non-default values.

ST> Right. And the Q45M seems to use UEFI.
ST> In that case the locked ME firmware remains the major obstacle, because
ST> we still don't know if the ME requires to be updated together with the
ST> BIOS region *in general*.

No, ME is very rarely (never?) updated together with the BIOS; usually
it's either a separate update (using Intel's FWUpdLcl.exe and a
specially-packaged ME image) or another elaborate step (e.g. MSI
P67A-G43 ME7 to ME8 update involves an EFI module inside the BIOS).

ST> In the case of the Q45M, the latest firmware update archive contains
ST> different binaries: (presumably) image of the whole flash space, images
ST> for each flash chip, and one image for the BIOS region only.
ST> The interesting bit is that the batch file included uses only the latter
ST> to write to the BIOS region. So i think it is safe to assume, that
ST> updating that region only is ok, which makes flashrom (including my
ST> layout patches) suitable for the job of reading the (updated, and
ST> configured) region out and deploying it on the other machines.

I think it makes sense to just update the BIOS region for the
descriptor-based flashes; AFAIK that's what all other tools do.

Another good feature would be to detect the NVAR partition and skip
it when flashing.

-- 
WBR,
 roxfan                            mailto:roxfan at skynet.be