Flashrom is a

software utility Utility software is software designed to help analyze, configure, optimize or maintain a computer. It is used to support the computer infrastructure - in contrast to application software, which is aimed at directly performing tasks that benefit ord ...

published under an

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

license that can detect, read, verify, erase, or write EEPROMs using interfaces such as the

Low Pin Count The Low Pin Count (LPC) bus is a computer bus used on IBM-compatible personal computers to connect low-bandwidth devices to the CPU, such as the BIOS ROM (BIOS ROM was moved to the Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI) bus in 2006), "legacy" I/O ...

(LPC), FWH, parallel, and

Serial Peripheral Interface The Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI) is a synchronous serial communication interface specification used for short-distance communication, primarily in embedded systems. The interface was developed by Motorola in the mid-1980s and has become a ...

(SPI). It can be used to flash

firmware In computing, firmware is a specific class of computer software that provides the low-level control for a device's specific hardware. Firmware, such as the BIOS of a personal computer, may contain basic functions of a device, and may provide h ...

images such as BIOS or

coreboot coreboot, formerly known as LinuxBIOS, is a software project aimed at replacing proprietary firmware (BIOS or UEFI) found in most computers with a lightweight firmware designed to perform only the minimum number of tasks necessary to load and r ...

, or to backup existing firmware.

Details

It is

free software Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, no ...

released under the terms of the

GNU General Public License The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the Four Freedoms (Free software), four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was th ...

version 2. It has pciutils and

zlib zlib ( or "zeta-lib", ) is a software library used for data compression. zlib was written by Jean-loup Gailly and Mark Adler and is an abstraction of the DEFLATE compression algorithm used in their gzip file compression program. zlib is also ...

as dependencies, and for some programmers also libftdi and

libusb libusb is a library that provides applications with access for controlling data transfer to and from USB devices on Unix and non-Unix systems, without the need for kernel-mode drivers. Availability libusb is currently available for Linux, th ...

. It is run from

user space A modern computer operating system usually segregates virtual memory into user space and kernel space. Primarily, this separation serves to provide memory protection and hardware protection from malicious or errant software behaviour. Kernel ...

and usually requires

superuser In computing, the superuser is a special user account used for system administration. Depending on the operating system (OS), the actual name of this account might be root, administrator, admin or supervisor. In some cases, the actual name of t ...

privileges (except when using supported USB devices as programmer).

Supported hardware

Support for programmers include the Bus Pirate and the

Raspberry Pi Raspberry Pi () is a series of small single-board computers (SBCs) developed in the United Kingdom by the Raspberry Pi Foundation in association with Broadcom. The Raspberry Pi project originally leaned towards the promotion of teaching basic ...

. It supports over 480 flash chip families, 291 chipsets, 524 mainboards, 71 PCI devices, 19 USB devices and various parallel/serial port-based devices which can be used as programmers. It supports cross-flashing and hot-flashing. Supported packaging types include

dual in-line package In microelectronics, a dual in-line package (DIP or DIL), is an electronic component package with a rectangular housing and two parallel rows of electrical connecting pins. The package may be through-hole mounted to a printed circuit board (P ...

(DIP),

plastic leaded chip carrier In electronics, a chip carrier is one of several kinds of surface-mount technology packages for integrated circuits (commonly called "chips"). Connections are made on all four edges of a square package; compared to the internal cavity for mounti ...

(PLCC),

small-outline integrated circuit A small outline integrated circuit (SOIC) is a surface-mounted integrated circuit (IC) package which occupies an area about 30–50% less than an equivalent dual in-line package (DIP), with a typical thickness being 70% less. They are generall ...

(SOIC),

thin small-outline package Thin small outline package (TSOP) is a type of surface mount IC package. They are very low-profile (about 1mm) and have tight lead spacing (as low as 0.5mm). They are frequently used for RAM or Flash memory ICs due to their high pin count and ...

(TSOP), or

ball grid array A ball grid array (BGA) is a type of surface-mount packaging (a chip carrier) used for integrated circuits. BGA packages are used to permanently mount devices such as microprocessors. A BGA can provide more interconnection pins than can be p ...

(BGA) packages.

References

External links

* * {{Firmware and booting BIOS Free software programmed in C Free system software Software related to embedded Linux

Details

Supported hardware

See also

References

External links