BIOS flashing under BSD?

Bruce M Simpson bms at spc.org
Mon Oct 21 09:30:25 BST 2002


Does anyone know of tools which run under *BSD or Linux which allow one to
flash the firmware on PCI (or other) devices?  e.g.
 - Adaptec PCI devices.
 - All VGA devices, especially low-end ones.
 - Network devices, particularly low-end Realtek kit with boot flash.
 - Intel Fast EtherExpress (Win2k I know about..)
 - Motherboard BIOS flash.
 - Macintosh versions of any of the above.

If anybody has access to any of the above and is willing to spare a few
moments to pull some ROM images I'd be most grateful.. especially Mac
versions of the kit.

Would rather cards had flash than mask ROM or EEPROM, as pulling them out
for reprogramming is a real PITA.

As a point of interest, if you have a motherboard with Award BIOS, I suggest
grabbing the cbrom6.exe tool and running against a backup of your BIOS image,
you may be surprised at what you see, for example, from an A/Open MX3S with
the onboard fxp option:
[snip]
 10. PCI driver[A]     04000h(16.00K)02594h(9.39K)NCR307.16K
 11. PCI driver[B]     0D800h(54.00K)08651h(33.58K)PXE.ROM

As you can see A/Open have stuck in the necessary Intel Boot Agent PXE ROM,
and a ROM BIOS for commodity LSI/Symbios/NCR SCSI cards. Also, you can
run this tool under FreeBSD using 'doscmd -x'. (Pity it doesn't do DPMI.)

BMS




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