[flashrom] flashrom support: schematic of various Fujitsu boards

[Stefan Tauner]

On Thu, 7 Jan 2016 22:47:07 +0100
Elmar Stellnberger <estellnb at elstel.org> wrote:

> Hi,
> 
>    No more than one year ago I had asked via IRC about flashrom support 
> for my FTS Amilo Xi 2550. I was promised that you would help me if I 
> could provide the schematic of the board. Having talked back with 
> Fujitsu that time I have now seen that Fujitsu has published something 
> about the schematic of their boards a.o. at notebookschematic.org.
> 
> FTS Amilo Xi 2550: 
> http://notebookschematic.org/product/schematic-motherboard-for-laptop-fujitsu-siemens-amilo-pi2530pi2550xi2550-uniwill-p75p55imx-rev-c/
> FTS Amilo Xi 3650: 
> http://laptopserviz.bg/enview/fujitsu-siemens-amilo-xi-3650-schematic-xy680.html
> 
>    While the Xi 3650 is already supported since a patch by Stefan Tauner 
> :) I would still be interested in support for my Xi 2550; i.e. I am 
> ready to test flashrom support for it; and if necessary I do also have 
> the address of support and a 'Fujitsu qualified ship level repairer' who 
> should know more details about thechnical stuff as well as the schematic.

Hi Elmar,

supporting laptops is not exactly trivial. If you look at the cover
page of the 2550 you can see that the SPI flash chip is not connected
to the southbridge directly but that the embedded controller (EC, an
ITE IT8250) sits between them. This is a major problem for flashrom
because the embedded controllers require their own firmware which often
sits in the same flash chip as the main board firmware. Modifying the
flash chip therefore might lock up the EC essentially bricking the
complete system. See also https://www.flashrom.org/Laptop_enable etc.
This is completely different from to tiny change that was required to
mark the 3650 as working fine.

I would definitely not recommend you try it because most likely you
will not succeed and harm the hardware but you can enable some code for
the IT85* chips in it85spi.c by uncommenting the it85xx_spi_init() call
at line 255. You should be prepared to program the flash chip
externally because you probably will need to when the laptop becomes a
brick.

-- 
Kind regards/Mit freundlichen Grüßen, Stefan Tauner