Universal BIOS Flash utility for FreeBSD, Linux

The developers of the CoreBoot project have released FlashROM 0.9 which is able to read, delete, rewrite and verify the flash chips which store a systems BIOS.

coreboot (formerly known as LinuxBIOS) is a Free Software project aimed at replacing the proprietary BIOS (firmware) you can find in most of today’s computers. It performs just a little bit of hardware initialization and then executes a so-called payload.

Benefits:  100% Free Software (GPL), no royalties, no license fees! Fast boot times (3 seconds to Linux console)

FlashROM runs on FreeBSD, Linux, Solaris and Mac OS X and allows re-flashing to take place from the command line on a running operating system. With FlashROM it is possible to re-flash the BIOS without rebooting the PC at all. Most manufacturers’ flash programming utilities only support Windows / DOS and require you to reboot the PC in order to re-flash the BIOS. The FlashROM program only requires root access to a system and can be run remotely via SSH.

A wide range of motherboards and flash chip-sets (157 flash chip families and 75 different chip-sets) are supported. There’s also support for dozens of non-standard x86 motherboards are supported in the 0.9.0 release.

Howto: Booting FreeBSD using coreboot

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