[LinuxBIOS] Getting Friendly with Flashrom

[Corey Osgood]

David H. Barr wrote:
> On 3/21/07, Carl-Daniel Hailfinger <c-d.hailfinger.devel.2006 at gmx.net> wrote:
>> On 21.03.2007 01:53, David H. Barr wrote:
>>> On 3/20/07, David H. Barr <dhbarr at gozelle.com> wrote:
>>>> I have not yet issued a write in the ORG position, only read and verify.  I
>>>> erased the Pm49FL004 flash part present in the BIOS Savior, not the onboard
>>>> W39V040B.
>>> Long story short, flashrom -w is a no-go for this board (MSI K9N Neo f
>>> / ms7260).
>>>
>>> Anyhoo, chalk another board on the "needs vendor mojo to enable writes" list.
>>> For the record, the vendor-supplied utility is "AMIFlh.exe" from AMIBIOS.
>> Does AMIFLH.exe work in dosemu or some other environment where it can be
>> aborted while flashing so we can find out if an aborted AMIFLH is enough
>> for flashrom -w to work?
> 
> A few unsorted thoughts:
> 
>   - the correct name of this tool is AFUDOS; AMIFLH is a vendor re-badge
>   - the same type of utility from Award / Phoenix is AWDFLASH
>   - MSI uses both AWD and AMI BIOS images, so the "mojo" may be present
>     in both utilities (a generic enable sequence?  a list of enable sequences?)
>   - as you mention, what about aborts / interrupts
>   - what about a binary patch against one of these tools to "force" a write
>   - along that same line, what about disabling one or more section of these
>     tools to end up with a simple "enabler", or a brute force writer, or ???
>   - my hunch tells me the AWDFLASH util is more logical, and therefore
>     easier to toy with;  AFUDOS appears to be built on top of another tool
> 
> I'll try some follow-up with various dos-type environments to see if
> that particular avenue of investigation takes me anywhere.  I'd be
> happy with any clearly legal solution that can be a) reliably
> reproduced, b) documented, and c) automated.
> 
> -dhb.
> 

Probably a stupid question, but why don't we just ask the uniflash
developer how he figured it out? He's got support for several different
boards with special locking mechanisms.

-Corey