[coreboot] [flashrom] unusual SST39SF020 chip

[Carl-Daniel Hailfinger]

On 15.05.2008 10:49, Andriy Gapon wrote:
> on 15/05/2008 05:32 Carl-Daniel Hailfinger said the following:
>> Hi Andriy,
>>
>> On 14.05.2008 22:30, Andriy Gapon wrote:
>>> First of all, I have a very rough (and ugly!) patch that makes
>>> flashrom work on FreeBSD. I tried it for reading BIOS image and it
>>> worked.
>>>   
>>
>> Can you mail the patch to the list? We want flashrom to be
>> cross-platform and will try to merge the patch or at least a variant
>> of it.
>
>
> The diff is attached.
> But it is really very ugly and hackish.
> The most noisy change is that outb has different order of arguments on
> Linux and FreeBSD.

I think we can merge the outb -> lin_outb change, though I we may want
to call it outb_wrapper or somesuch. Can you send that as a separate patch?


>>> I have an old system with MP2-BX-X, please see some description here:
>>> http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/3686/delta_mp2.html
>>> It is based on 440BX chipset.
>>>
>>> Visually I was able to identify that BIOS flash chip is SST39SF020,
>>> but flashrom didn't initially recognize it.
>>> Some debugging showed that it has JEDEC ids 0x25 for vendor and 0xE5
>>> for device. Very unusual. So I decided to let you know.
>>>   
>>
>> The JEDEC vendor ID 0x25 can mean any of the following companies:
>> - Tristar
>> - Zarlink/Mitel
>> - Chameleon systems
>> - Kingmax Semiconductor
>> - Phyworks
>> - Power-One
>>
>> None of the companies above are in the BIOS flash market AFAICS.
>> Probably this is just a strange reading of real flash contents at ID
>> offsets.
>>
>>> The data that flashrom read are very similar to the data in vendor
>>> provided bios .bin. There are differences in a chunk of about 12k
>>> size, I guess this is where bios stored some config data.
>>>   
>>
>> Can you hexdump the first 8 bytes of the bios.bin you read back from
>> your chip?
>
> Here it is (16 bytes):
> 00000000  25 e5 2d 6c 68 35 2d 52  16 00 00 9e 1f 00 00 02
>
> It does include -lh5- signature. I was even able to split it into
> several chunks on that signature, decompress the chunks and even
> disassemble some pieces. Interestingly enough this BIOS contains
> original.tm1 file in addition to original.tmp and the former seems to
> be a trailer of the latter.
>
> Hmm, I see that 25 e5 is present here. So it might mean that my ported
> code didn't properly enable flash chip communication?

Yes, indeed. For details, see Stefan's answer.
Oh, and the SST39 series are not really the ideal chips to test flashrom
with. I have one of those chips which seemed to be damaged beyond repair
after flashing it.

Regards,
Carl-Daniel