John Carl Villanueva05 February 2010, 7:00 AM
Since the release of its previous version in May 2009, at least 30 additional flash chip families and half a dozen variants for each family are now being supported by Flashrom.
Flashrom allows users to perform BIOS, EFI, coreboot, or firmware flashes without having to undergo sophisticated boot procedures that require bootable floppy disks/CD-ROMs or even opening the computer's casing. We first featured flashrom here in an article entitled
BIOS flashing comes to Linux at last. If you have no idea what flashrom is, that article can help you grasp the basics.
While there are other vendor flash tools out there, flashrom is touted to be faster.
Aside from Linux (which flashrom already has binary packages for Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Gentoo, Mandriva, and openSUSE) flashrom already supports FreeBSD, DragonFly, Nexenta, Solaris, and even Mac OS X.
Carl-Daniel Hilfinger, one of the lead developers of flashrom, however, does not yet recommend using flashrom for laptops since "laptops share their flash chip between the main CPU and an undocumented embedded controller which may crash the machine during flashing." But he assures that this limitation will be addressed once they get a hold of the documents for those embedded controllers.
First-timers, be warned. Despite the success of many users, flashing ROMs is still considered a risky exercise. If you decide to go ahead and try flashrom anyway but things go awry, you may seek help through IRC #flashrom on
irc.freenode.net or through the
flashrom mailing list.