leio@gentoo.org
idl0r@gentoo.org
Christian Ruppert
peter@stuge.se
Please CC on all bugs
flashrom is a utility for identifying, reading, writing, verifying and erasing flash chips. It is designed to flash BIOS/EFI/coreboot/firmware/optionROM images on mainboards, network/graphics/storage controller cards, and various programmer devices.
* Supports more than 261 flash chips, 152 chipsets, 259 mainboards, 43 PCI devices, 5 USB devices and various parallel/serial port-based programmers.
* Supports parallel, LPC, FWH and SPI flash interfaces and various chip packages (DIP32, PLCC32, DIP8, SO8/SOIC8, TSOP32, TSOP40, TSOP48, and more)
* No physical access needed, root access is sufficient.
* No bootable floppy disk, bootable CD-ROM or other media needed.
* No keyboard or monitor needed. Simply reflash remotely via SSH.
* No instant reboot needed. Reflash your chip in a running system, verify it, be happy. The new firmware will be present next time you boot.
* Crossflashing and hotflashing is possible as long as the flash chips are electrically and logically compatible (same protocol). Great for recovery.
* Scriptability. Reflash a whole pool of identical machines at the same time from the command line. It is recommended to check flashrom output and error codes.
* Speed. flashrom is often much faster than most vendor flash tools.
* Portability. Supports DOS, Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, DragonFly BSD, Solaris, Mac OS X, and other Unix-like OSes. Partial Windows support is available (full support as patch).