[flashrom] [RFC] Kill --force

Michael Karcher flashrom at mkarcher.dialup.fu-berlin.de
Mon Apr 12 23:18:43 CEST 2010


Am Montag, den 12.04.2010, 21:18 +0200 schrieb Carl-Daniel Hailfinger:
> You can recover with a soldering iron and an external flasher (a $10
> used mainboard with parallel flash on ebay might suffice).
Correct. Although I am afraid that he would have to solder/desolder TSOP
which is the most common flash chip outline used in laptops. Desoldering
TSOP is probably easier with a hot-air blower (needs at least 250°C,
typical hair-dryers probably are not enough).

> The fact that pure write worked for you was just luck. Really.
Huh, why that? It's the same thing the vendor tool does. Is it pure luck
on that tool, too? As long as you don't reenable the EC while there is
no valid code, everything *should* be fine. Of course you will brick the
system if you write something into the flash that is *not* valid
resumable EC code.

> This problem is fundamentally unsolvable on a technical level, and needs
> to be addressed (and hopefully solved) as a social problem.
Still I think it might be a good idea to block -E on shared-flash
systems. As shared-flash systems generally need a board-enable to
stop/restart the EC, it would be no problem to set a flag from that
procedure that invalid flash contents will brick the system.

Of course, for the general aspect of flashrom being able to brick
systems, you are right that we definitely can not catch every corner
case that would brick a system, but one could still catch the most
prominent cases.

Kind regards,
  Michael Karcher





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