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flashrom

NAME

flashrom - detect, read, write, verify and erase flash chips

SYNOPSIS

flashrom [-n] [-V] [-f] [-h|-R|-L|-z|-E|-r <file>|-w <file>|-v <file>]
         [-c <chipname>] [-m [<vendor>:]<part>] [-l <file>]
         [-i <image>] [-p <programmername>[:<parameters>]]

DESCRIPTION

flashrom is a utility for detecting, reading, writing, verifying and erasing flash chips. It's often used to flash BIOS/EFI/coreboot/firmware images in-system using a supported mainboard, but it also supports flashing of network cards (NICs), SATA controller cards, and other external devices which can program flash chips.

It supports a wide range of DIP32, PLCC32, DIP8, SO8/SOIC8, TSOP32, and TSOP40 chips, which use various protocols such as LPC, FWH, parallel flash, or SPI.

OPTIONS

Please note that the command line interface for flashrom will change before flashrom 1.0. Do not use flashrom in scripts or other automated tools without checking that your flashrom version won't interpret options in a different way.

You can specify one of -h, -R, -L, -z, -E, -r, -w, -v or no operation. If no operation is specified, flashrom will only probe for flash chips. It is recommended that if you try flashrom the first time on a system, you run it in probe only mode and check the output. Also you are advised to make a backup of your current ROM contents with -r before you try to write a new image.

-r, --read <file>

Read flash ROM contents and save them into the given <file>.

-w, --write <file>

Write <file> into flash ROM.

-n, --noverify

Skip the automatic verification of flash ROM contents after writing. Using this option is not recommended, you should only use it if you know what you are doing and if you feel that the time for verification takes too long.

Typical usage is: flashrom -n -w file

This option is only useful in combination with --write.

-v, --verify <file>

Verify the flash ROM contents against the given <file>.

-E, --erase

Erase the flash ROM chip.

-V, --verbose

More verbose output.

-c, --chip <chipname>

Probe only for specified flash ROM chip. This option takes the chip name as printed by flashrom -L without the vendor name. Please note that the chip name is case sensitive.

-m, --mainboard [<vendor>:]<part>

Override mainboard settings.

flashrom reads the coreboot table to determine the current mainboard. If no coreboot table could be read or if you want to override these values, you can specify -m, e.g.:

flashrom --mainboard AGAMI:ARUMA -w agami_aruma.rom

See the 'Supported mainboards' section in the output of 'flashrom -L' for a list of boards which require the specification of the board name, if no coreboot table is found.

-f, --force

Force one or more of the following actions:

* Force chip read and pretend the chip is there.

* Force chip access even if the chip is bigger than max decode size for
 the flash bus.

* Force erase even if erase is known bad.

* Force write even if write is known bad.

-l, --layout <file>

Read ROM layout from <file>.

flashrom supports ROM layouts. This allows you to flash certain parts of the flash chip only. A ROM layout file looks like follows:

  00000000:00008fff gfxrom
  00009000:0003ffff normal
  00040000:0007ffff fallback

  i.e.:
  startaddr:endaddr name

All addresses are offsets within the file, not absolute addresses! If you only want to update the normal image in a ROM you can say:

flashrom --layout rom.layout --image normal -w agami_aruma.rom

To update normal and fallback but leave the VGA BIOS alone, say:

flashrom -l rom.layout -i normal
-i fallback -w agami_aruma.rom

Currently overlapping sections are not supported.

-i, --image <name>

Only flash image <name> from flash layout.

-L, --list-supported

List the flash chips, chipsets, mainboards, and PCI card "programmers" supported by flashrom.

There are many unlisted boards which will work out of the box, without special support in flashrom. Please let us know if you can verify that other boards work or do not work out of the box. For verification you have to test an ERASE and/or WRITE operation, so make sure you only do that if you have proper means to recover from failure!

-z, --list-supported-wiki

Same as --list-supported, but outputs the supported hardware in MediaWiki syntax, so that it can be easily pasted into the wiki page at http://www.flashrom.org/. Please note that MediaWiki output is not compiled in by default.

-p, --programmer <name>[:parameter[,parameter[,parameter]]]

Specify the programmer device. Currently supported are:

* internal (default, for in-system flashing in the mainboard)

* dummy (just prints all operations and accesses)

* nic3com (for flash ROMs on 3COM network cards)

* gfxnvidia (for flash ROMs on NVIDIA graphics cards)

* drkaiser (for flash ROMs on Dr. Kaiser PC-Waechter PCI cards)

* satasii (for flash ROMs on Silicon Image SATA/IDE controllers)

* atahpt (for flash ROMs on Highpoint ATA/RAID controllers)

* it87spi (for flash ROMs behind an ITE IT87xx Super I/O LPC/SPI translation unit)

* ft2232spi (for flash ROMs attached to a FT2232H/FT4232H based USB SPI programmer)

* serprog (for flash ROMs attached to Urja's AVR programmer)

* buspiratespi (for flash ROMs attached to a Bus Pirate)

Some programmers have optional or mandatory parameters which are described in detail in the PROGRAMMER SPECIFIC INFO section. Support for some programmers can be disabled at compile time. flashrom -h lists all supported programmers.

-h, --help

Show a help text and exit.

-R, --version

Show version information and exit.

PROGRAMMER SPECIFIC INFO

Some programmer drivers accept further parameters to set programmer-specific parameters. These parameters are separated from the programmer name by a colon. While some programmers take arguments at fixed positions, other programmers use a key/value interface in which the key and value is separated by an equal sign and different pairs are separated by a comma or a colon.

internal programmer

Some mainboards require to run mainboard specific code to enable flash erase and write support (and probe support on old systems with parallel flash). The mainboard brand and model (if it requires specific code) is usually autodetected using one of the following mechanisms: If your system is running coreboot, the mainboard type is determined from the coreboot table, otherwise, the mainboard is detected by examining the onboard PCI devices and possibly DMI info. If PCI and DMI do not contain information to uniquely identify the mainboard (which is the exception), it might be necessary to specify the mainboard using the -m switch (see above).

Some of these board-specific flash enabling functions (called board enables) in flashrom have not yet been tested. If your mainboard is detected needing an untested board enable function, a warning message is printed and the board enable is not executed, because a wrong board enable function might cause the system to behave erratically, as board enable functions touch the low-level internals of a mainboard. Not executing a board enable function (if one is needed) might cause detection or erasing failure. If your board protects only part of the flash (commonly the top end, called boot block), flashrom might encounter an error only after erasing the unprotected part, so running without the board-enable function might be dangerous for erase and write (which includes erase).

The suggested procedure for a mainboard with untested board specific code is to first try to probe the ROM (just invoke flashrom and check that it detects your flash chip type) without running the board enable code (i.e. without any parameters). If it finds your chip, fine, otherwise, retry probing your chip with the board-enable code running, using

flashrom -p internal:boardenable=force

If your chip is still not detected, the board enable code seems to be broken or the flash chip unsupported. Otherwise, make a backup of your current ROM contents (using -r) and store it to a medium outside of your computer, like an USB drive or a network share. If you needed to run the board enable code already for probing, use it for reading too. Now you can try to write the new image. You should enable the board enable code in any case now, as it has been written because it is known that writing/erasing without the board enable is going to fail. In any case (success or failure), please report to the flashrom mailing list, see below.

On systems running coreboot, flashrom checks whether the desired image matches your mainboard. This needs some special board ID to be present in the image. If flashrom detects that the image you want to write and the current board do not match, it will refuse to write the image unless you specify

flashrom -p internal:boardmismatch=force

If your mainboard uses an ITE IT87 series Super I/O for LPC<->SPI flash bus translation, flashrom should autodetect that configuration. You can use

flashrom -p internal:it87spiport=portnum syntax as explained in the it87spi programmer section to use a non-default port for controlling the IT87 series Super I/O. In the unlikely case flashrom doesn't detect an active IT87 LPC<->SPI bridge, you can try to force recognition by using the it87spi programmer.

Using flashrom on laptops is dangerous and may easily make your hardware unusable (see also the BUGS section). The embedded controller (EC) in these machines often interacts badly with flashing. http://www.flashrom.org/Laptops has more information. If flash is shared with the EC, erase is guaranteed to brick your laptop and write is very likely to brick your laptop. Chip read and probe may irritate your EC and cause fan failure, backlight failure, sudden poweroff, and other nasty effects. flashrom will attempt to detect laptops and abort immediately for safety reasons. If you want to proceed anyway at your own risk, use

flashrom -p internal:laptop=force_I_want_a_brick

You have been warned.

We will not help you if you force flashing on a laptop because this is a really dumb idea.

dummy programmer

An optional parameter specifies the bus types it should support. For that you have to use the flashrom -p dummy:type syntax where type can be any comma-separated combination of parallel lpc fwh spi all in any order.

Example: flashrom -p dummy:lpc,fwh

nic3com, gfxnvidia, satasii and atahpt programmers

These programmers have an option to specify the PCI address of the card your want to use, which must be specified if more than one card supported by the selected programmer is installed in your system. The syntax is flashrom -p xxxx:bb:dd.f , where xxxx is the name of the programmer bb is the PCI bus number, dd is the PCI device number, and f is the PCI function number of the desired NIC.

Example: flashrom -p nic3com:05:04.0

it87spi programmer

An optional parameter sets the I/O base port of the IT87* SPI controller interface to the port specified in the parameter instead of using the port address set by the BIOS. For that you have to use the flashrom -p it87spi:it87spiport=portnum syntax where portnum is an I/O port number which must be a multiple of 8.

ft2232spi programmer

An optional parameter species the controller type and interface/port it should support. For that you have to use the flashrom -p ft2232spi:model,port=interface syntax where model can be any of 2232H 4232H and interface can be any of A B. The default model is 4232H and the default interface is B.

serprog programmer

A mandatory parameter specifies either a serial device/baud combination or an IP/port combination for communication with the programmer. In the device/baud combination, the device has to start with a slash. For serial, you have to use the flashrom -p serprog:/dev/device:baud syntax and for IP, you have to use flashrom -p serprog:ip:port instead. More information about serprog is available in serprog-protocol.txt in the source distribution.

buspiratespi programmer

A required dev parameter specifies the Bus Pirate device node and an optional spispeed parameter specifies the frequency of the SPI bus. The parameter delimiter is a comma. Syntax is

flashrom -p buspiratespi:dev=/dev/device,spispeed=frequency

where frequency can be any of 30k 125k 250k 1M 2M 2.6M 4M 8M (in Hz). The default is the maximum frequency of 8 MHz.

EXIT STATUS

flashrom exits with 0 on success, 1 on most failures but with 2 if /dev/mem (/dev/xsvc on Solaris) can not be opened and with 3 if a call to mmap() fails.

BUGS

Please report any bugs at http://www.flashrom.org/trac/flashrom/newticket, or on the flashrom mailing list at http://www.flashrom.org/mailman/listinfo/flashrom.

Using flashrom on laptops is dangerous and may easily make your hardware unusable unless you can desolder the flash chip and have a full flash chip backup. This is caused by the embedded controller (EC) present in many laptops, which interacts badly with any flash attempts. This is a hardware limitation and flashrom will attempt to detect it and abort immediately for safety reasons.

LICENCE

flashrom is covered by the GNU General Public License (GPL), version 2. Some files are additionally available under the GPL (version 2, or any later version).

COPYRIGHT

Please see the individual files.

AUTHORS

Carl-Daniel Hailfinger
Claus Gindhart <claus.gindhart@kontron.com>
Dominik Geyer <dominik.geyer@kontron.com>
Eric Biederman
Giampiero Giancipoli <gianci@email.it>
Joe Bao <Zheng.Bao@amd.com>
Luc Verhaegen <libv@skynet.be>
Li-Ta Lo
Markus Boas <ryven@ryven.de>
Michael Karcher <flashrom@mkarcher.dialup.fu-berlin.de>
Nikolay Petukhov <nikolay.petukhov@gmail.com>
Peter Stuge <peter@stuge.se>
Reinder E.N. de Haan <lb_reha@mveas.com>
Ronald G. Minnich <rminnich@gmail.com>
Ronald Hoogenboom <ronald@zonnet.nl>
Sean Nelson <audiohacked@gmail.com>
Stefan Reinauer <stepan@coresystems.de>
Stefan Wildemann <stefan.wildemann@kontron.com>
Steven James <pyro@linuxlabs.com>
Uwe Hermann <uwe@hermann-uwe.de>
Wang Qingpei
Yinghai Lu
some others

This manual page was written by Uwe Hermann <uwe@hermann-uwe.de> and Carl-Daniel Hailfinger. It is licensed under the terms of the GNU GPL (version 2 or later).