[flashrom] [PROPOSAL] support for NIC RTL8139 onboard flashing

[Jörg Fischer]

Hi,
Carl-Daniel Hailfinger schrieb:

> On 17.05.2010 18:27, Jörg Fischer wrote:
>> Guenter schrieb:
>>   
>>> a lot of Realtek RTL8139 NICs have a DIL-32 bootrom socket [...]
>>>     
>> Many cards tie the "write enable" Pin to its logic "not enabled" state
>> instead of connecting to the chip, so flash writes are impossible on
>> _most_ card types I came across. YMMV.
>>   
> 
> Ouch. Not really a good way to use the cards as programmers.

I have only 2 "known working" card types:
SMC1211 TX with 10/100 RJ-54 AND 10Base-T (was quite expensive at its
time), and "Longshine" cards with RTL8139C Chip.

>> I have still some not-really-working code from my earlier experiments. I
>> could read the chip-id and erase the chip - but the erase test failed
>> afterwards, though the cips' contents seemed to be all 0xFF.
>>   
> 
> Working ID and working erase, only with failing erase test? We had such
> issues on multiple programmers, and it turned out that the timing in
> flashrom was broken for the affected flash chips. This has since been
> fixed, so maybe your code now works fine?

Have not checked that for quite some time now.

>> If you are still interested: The attached .c file contains details on
>> how to talk to the flash chip on RTL 8139 NIC.
>>   
> 
> IMHO any code which can at least get chip IDs is good enough to get
> merged (disabled by default until all issues are fixed). That will allow
> others to hack on the code and makes sure the code is not forgotten.
> Could you please resend it as a complete patch with a Signed-off-by line?

This may take some time, I am rather busy right now...

-- J. Fischer