Re: Flash BIOS under linux

David Woodhouse (David.Woodhouse@mvhi.com)
Thu, 01 Apr 1999 16:10:43 +0100


djones2@glam.ac.uk said:
> To the best of my knowledge this doesn't exist.

It does. See http://www.freiburg.linux.de/~stepan/bios/

> And as some BIOS manufacturers are very prohibitive about their
> technology, it's unlikely that a generic tool will ever happen. You /
> may/ convince some vendors to port to Linux, but I can't see that
> happening.

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.

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.

> It'll be interesting to see how the OpenBIOS people get around this
> problem.

dd if=rom.bin of=/dev/bios

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