[LinuxBIOS] Winflashrom -- Current Status

Carl-Daniel Hailfinger c-d.hailfinger.devel.2006 at gmx.net
Sun Sep 23 13:49:52 CEST 2007


On 19.09.2007 07:34, Darmawan Salihun wrote:
> I've bought an AMD690G system for further development. Nonetheless, there's
> a problem with the datasheets.
> The SB600 datasheet from AMD documents informs nothing about the PCI
> registers pertaining to "flash enable".

Since AMD has released detailed datasheets for a few ATI graphics cards
in the last few days, I expect detailed SB600 datasheets may be on the
horizon as well if we ask nicely.

@AMD: Is there any information missing from the public SB600 data sheets?

However, it is quite possible that SB600 has no flash enable and this is
entirely managed by GPIOs on the SuperIO.

> The only solution is to reverse-engineer a working solution, i.e. Award
> Winflash to find out about it because it
> supports the platform. I need this because I need to test my further
> Winflashrom code in my testbed prior to
> releasing it. Unless someone would donate a motherboard with an already
> supported chipset ;-).
> 
> My question is, how can I provide you guys with a clean source code that
> would be legal?

I have quite some experience with clean room reverse engineering. Back
then, it was the Nvidia network driver where we (Andrew de Quincey and
me) wrote a hardware data sheet from the binary driver and someone else
implemented forcedeth just by looking at the data sheet we had written.

> Should I be producing a document and someone else here code it for me and
> others?

Generally, if you intend to work on the code later on or work on
winflashrom at all, you should make sure somebody else does the
reversing and writes the data sheet. That way, you are free to implement
a clean solution from the data sheet.

> ( I think this is what "clean room reverse engineering", right?)

Yes, but the recommendations above apply.

Regards,
Carl-Daniel





More information about the coreboot mailing list