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SubjectRe: Flash BIOS under linux
On Thu, 1 Apr 1999, David Woodhouse wrote:

> > To the best of my knowledge this doesn't exist.
> It does. See http://www.freiburg.linux.de/~stepan/bios/

I stand corrected.

> It's not too difficult to work it out. You know where the BIOS is mapped in
> memory because it's always at the same place (0xe0000 or 0xf0000?), you know
> what kind of flash chip they use because it's written on the top of the chip,
> and you know how to erase and write the flash because the manufacturer of the
> _flash_ publishes docs.

Is there a way in software to auto-sense the type of flash used ?
Maybe some BIOSes store that in their DMI area ?
(I forget whats stored there altogether).


> What you might _not_ know is the format in which your BIOS vendor distributes
> their upgrades. But I doubt it's hard to work that one out, either.

Exactly.
I doubt the encryption algorithms are PGP strength, more likely something
slightly more advanced than a progressive XOR. :)

> > It'll be interesting to see how the OpenBIOS people get around this
> > problem.
> dd if=rom.bin of=/dev/bios

That's pretty cool. Looks like an interesting project.
I notice from the docs that it was written around the time of 2.1.9x,
anyone tried it on anything more recent ?

I also notice it only supports a few chipsets. Mine isn't supported,
(VIA VP3) but I may see if I can hack something out of this tonight.
Fun :)

regards,

d.
_____________________________________________________________
| Dave 'Barc0de' Jones. (barc0de@digital-corruption.net) |
| http://www.comp.glam.ac.uk/students/djones2/ |
|_____________________________________________________________|


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