[coreboot] flashrom-1.0

[Nathan Coulson]

On Sun, Apr 27, 2008 at 6:16 PM, Peter Stuge <peter at stuge.se> wrote:
> I would like to release flashrom-1.0 before the weekend.
>
>  There was a bit of discussion on IRC tonight and I found there are
>  others who are also looking forward to a release.
>
>  Not so much because we think flashrom is currently in a particularly
>  awesome state, but rather because we would like to get it packaged,
>  distributed, used and marketed more - and that is really all version
>  numbers are good for anyway.
>
>  There are many pending patches in people's working copies that are on
>  their way into the repo, and that is great. I would like nothing more
>  than to make a 1.1 release shortly after 1.0, and I hope noone feels
>  that flashrom should freeze somehow just because it now has a version
>  number.
>
>  I think flashrom will always be work in progress to a high degree,
>  especially since the probing can never be fool proof because of our
>  dearest PC architecture, but I still would like to make releases.
>
>  While some parts of trunk flashrom may not be production quality,
>  there are some parts that are indeed production quality and that have
>  been heavily used. I think 1.0 is a nice round number and a great
>  starting point for future improvements. It also communicates the fact
>  that at least parts of flashrom are very good and quite usable, as
>  has been the case for several years already. :)
>
>
>  I've made a preliminary roadmap or action plan for 1.0:
>
>  1 handle the possibility of NULL flash chip function pointer derefs
>  2 add a tested flag to the flash chip table, most will be untested now
>  3 Carl-Daniel has a patch with fake flash chips of different sizes
>   that is good to let people at least read the flash chip even if
>   there is no support. Either this goes in as is and we add a -C
>   --force-chip option (or similar) or we could make a special
>   --force-read command to avoid cluttering the flash chip list with
>   dirty fake chips.
>  4 go over text output to find and do possible UI improvements
>  5 change -s and -e into -S and -E, and change -E into -e with the
>   rationale that erase is much more common than "exclude end position"
>  6 make probes advisory rather than controlling? always have the user
>   confirm the probed chipset before continuing?
>
>  I can do 1, 2 and 4. If there is agreement I'd love to do 5 too.
>
>  In 4 I include adding a message for the user about the mainboards
>  that need to be specified manually when board probing fails.
>
>  Please share your thoughts - and in particular anything on 3 or 6.
>
>
>  The plan is to create a repos/tags/flashrom-1.0 tag of the rev that
>  goes into release, and publish the release with a tarball on the
>  Flashrom wiki page.
>
>  For a bit of fun (gotta have some fun! :) we can have codenames for
>  releases when we feel like it, the 1.0 favorite is "apt apology."
>
>
>  Objections?
>  More must-have stuff before 1.0?
>
>  I don't want to add too much stuff, just trim away the worst rough
>  edges and make a release very soon.
>
>
>  //Peter
>
>  --
>  coreboot mailing list
>  coreboot at coreboot.org
>  http://www.coreboot.org/mailman/listinfo/coreboot

I just wanted to report my tests with flashrom.

Running on a EeePC 701 4G.

Calibrating delay loop... OK.
No coreboot table found.
Found chipset "Intel ICH6-M", enabling flash write... OK.
No EEPROM/flash device found.

(Not my site, but it has the specs on the EeePC)
http://beta.ivancover.com/wiki/index.php/Eee_PC_Research

ICH6-M southbridge, and one user reported having a WinBond W25x40


-- 
Nathan Coulson (conathan)
------
Location: Alberta, Canada
Timezone: MST (-7)
Webpage: http://www.nathancoulson.com