marecki@gentoo.org
Marek Szuba
flashrom is a utility for identifying, reading, writing, verifying and erasing flash chips. It is designed to flash BIOS/EFI/coreboot/firmware/optionROM images on mainboards, network/graphics/storage controller cards, and various other programmer devices.
Supports more than 380 flash chips, 260 chipsets, 450 mainboards, 50 PCI devices, 12 USB devices and various parallel/serial port-based programmers.
Supports parallel, LPC, FWH and SPI flash interfaces and various chip packages (DIP32, PLCC32, DIP8, SO8/SOIC8, TSOP32, TSOP40, TSOP48, BGA and more)
No physical access needed, root access is sufficient (not needed for some programmers).
No bootable floppy disk, bootable CD-ROM or other media needed.
No keyboard or monitor needed. Simply reflash remotely via SSH.
No instant reboot needed. Reflash your chip in a running system, verify it, be happy. The new firmware will be present next time you boot.
Crossflashing and hotflashing is possible as long as the flash chips are electrically and logically compatible (same protocol). Great for recovery.
Scriptability. Reflash a whole pool of identical machines at the same time from the command line. It is recommended to check flashrom output and error codes.
Speed. flashrom is often much faster than most vendor flash tools.
Portability. Supports DOS, Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, DragonFly BSD, Solaris, Mac OS X, and other Unix-like OSes. Partial Windows support is available (no internal programmer support at the moment, hence no "BIOS flashing").