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Flash Updates in Linux

Formerly OpenBIOS provided its own flashing facility implemented as a device driver called /dev/bios. One big disadvantage of /dev/bios was that it needed to be recompiled for every minor kernel update.

Ollie Lho, back when working at SIS, started a new effort which he called flash_and_burn. This utility became part of the LinuxBIOS project and evolved to work with non-SIS chipsets.

Stefan Reinauer added a lot of new features to Ollie's utility and renamed it to flashrom. This utility still lacks some features the old /dev/bios driver was having, but it can easily be used from userspace without recompiling the kernel.

You can download the latest version of flashrom from the LinuxBIOSv2 svn repository

FlashRom

Flash Updates in Linux

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