flashrom README — flashrom v1.7.0 documentation

flashrom is a utility for identifying, reading, writing, verifying and erasing flash chips. It is designed to flash BIOS/EFI/coreboot/firmware/optionROM images on mainboards, network/graphics/storage controller cards, and various other programmer devices.

- Supports more than 627 flash chips, 407 chipsets, 539 mainboards, 94 PCI devices, 30 USB devices and various parallel/serial port-based programmers. For more information, see the pages under Supported hardware.

- Supports parallel, LPC, FWH and SPI flash interfaces and various chip packages (DIP32, PLCC32, DIP8, SO8/SOIC8, TSOP32, TSOP40, TSOP48, BGA and more), see Overview.

- No physical access needed, root access is sufficient (not needed for some programmers).

- No bootable floppy disk, bootable CD-ROM or other media needed.

- No keyboard or monitor needed. Simply reflash remotely via SSH.

- No instant reboot needed. Reflash your chip in a running system, verify it, be happy. The new firmware will be present next time you boot.

- Crossflashing and hotflashing is possible as long as the flash chips are electrically and logically compatible (same protocol). Great for recovery.

- Scriptability. Reflash a whole pool of identical machines at the same time from the command line. It is recommended to check flashrom output and error codes.

- Speed. flashrom is often much faster than most vendor flash tools.

- Portability. Supports DOS, Linux, FreeBSD (including Debian/kFreeBSD), NetBSD, OpenBSD, DragonFlyBSD, anything Solaris-like, Mac OS X, and other Unix-like OSes as well as GNU Hurd. Partial Windows support is available (no internal programmer support at the moment, hence no "BIOS flashing").

Emergency help

IMPORTANT: If something went wrong during flashing, do NOT turn off/reboot your computer. Instead, let us help you recover. We can be contacted via IRC (#flashrom on libera.chat, webchat), Discord, or email. Please allow some time until someone responds, we're all volunteers.

# flashrom README

flashrom is a utility for detecting, reading, writing, verifying and erasing flash chips. It is often used to flash BIOS/EFI/coreboot/firmware images in-system using a supported mainboard, but it also supports flashing of network cards (NICs), SATA controller cards, and other external devices which can program flash chips.

It supports a wide range of flash chips (most commonly found in SOIC8, DIP8, SOIC16, WSON8, PLCC32, DIP32, TSOP32, and TSOP40 packages), which use various protocols such as LPC, FWH, parallel flash, or SPI.

Do not use flashrom on laptops (yet)! The embedded controller (EC) present in many laptops might interact badly with any attempts to communicate with the flash chip and may brick your laptop.

Please make a backup of your flash chip before writing to it.

Please see the flashrom(8) manpage Manual page.

The list of platforms that package flashrom can be found on repology.org.

Information about recent releases can be found in Release notes.

## Building / installing / packaging

flashrom is built with meson. TLDR:

    meson setup builddir
    meson compile -C builddir
    meson test -C builddir
    meson install -C builddir

For full detailed instructions, follow the information in Building from source.

If you are interested in development, have a look at Development Guide.

## Contact

The official flashrom website is:

> https://www.flashrom.org/

For available contact methods see Contact