[flashrom] MSI Z68MA-G45 report and on-board SPI flashing using Bus Pirate

[Paul Kocialkowski]

On Wed, 2012-06-20 at 18:11 +0200, Paul Kocialkowski wrote:
> I think next step is to try writing another firmware to the chip via
> SPI, to see how it goes. 

I extracted one from the latest windows binary MSI provides to update
the BIOS and will do the flashing later today.

While reading the board user manual, I saw that MSI provides the pinout
for the JCOM1 on-board connector: I assumed that's a serial port, which
could help when attempting to port coreboot to the board. 

Here is the pinout of both the JCOM1 connector and the DB9 connector I
used:
http://download.paulk.fr/coreboot/msi-z68ma-g45/jcom1-db9-pinout.png

After soldering it all [1], I put the connector on the board [2] and it
worked! I tested with a RS232 to USB adapter on one side and getty
listening on ttyS0 on the MSI Z68MA-G45 side: I was able to use the
shell from the USB adapter side!

I'm not particularly asking for help there, I just thought it would be a
good idea to publish all this, in case one wants to start a port to a
similar MSI board.

Though, there is something that could be serial-related: I can't find
any reference to the SuperIO! coreboot's superiotool didn't detect any.
Is it possible that the Z68 chipset is handling serial too?

[1]
http://download.paulk.fr/coreboot/msi-z68ma-g45/jcom1-soldered-connector.jpg
[2]
http://download.paulk.fr/coreboot/msi-z68ma-g45/jcom1-on-board-connector.jpg

--
Paul Kocialkowski