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SubjectANNOUNCE: /dev/bios - flash rom bios driver
Hi folks,

While in former times these BIOSs were implemented by using ROM or
EPROM (both can´t be updated without opening your computer) today´s
PC hardware is often delivered with a so called FLASH ROM. These
can be rewritten by a single piece of software.

Now it happened that we live in an evil world and most hardware
manufacturers only wrote this software for that one proprietary
operating system that still seems to be around. BAD!

As a solution I tried to write some Linux software which is able to do
the same fine thing. The BIOS is in some way a piece of hardware and
it's very sensitive. So I decided to write a kernel driver that contains
the neccessary information to read/write those flashchips. Userland
programs that stop multitasking to prevent bios write failures are
undiscussable in my opion.

With this driver it's possible to do things like

dd if=/bios.bin of=/dev/bios bs=128k count=1


I tested the driver with different kinds of configurations, but all
using Intel PCI chipsets. Writing to the flashchip has only been tested
on a Winbond W29EE011 chip.

If you are interested in testing this driver, you may have a look at

http://www.freiburg.linux.de/~stepan/projects.html

If want to test the driver or if you tested it
successfully/unsuccessfully, please mail me.
I am happy about getting any kind of comment.


Best regards,
Stefan Reinauer

--
http://www.freiburg.linux.de/
GGI - The right thing to do.

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