v1.6 (July 2025)¶
This document describes the major changes in flashrom version v1.6.0, which covers the work done in 56+ commits by 18 authors during 6 months time since previous release. Thank you!
Download¶
flashrom v1.6 can be downloaded in various ways:
Anonymous checkout from the git repository at https://review.coreboot.org/flashrom.git (tag v1.6.0)
A tarball is available for download at https://download.flashrom.org/releases/flashrom-v1.6.0.tar.xz (signature https://download.flashrom.org/releases/flashrom-v1.6.0.tar.xz.asc)
fingerprint: 6E6E F9A0 BA47 8006 E277 6E4C C037 BB41 3134 D111
Known issue¶
AMD-based PCs with FCH are unable to read flash contents for internal (BIOS flash) chips larger than 16 MB, and attempting to do so may crash the system. Systems with AMD “Promontory” IO extenders (mostly “Zen” desktop platforms) are not currently supported.
New features¶
-r/-w/-v argument is optional when using -i¶
See Manual page for details.
Added support for the Excamera Labs SPIDriver¶
New programmer spidriver supports Excamera Labs SPIDriver device
which is a SPI hardware interface with a display,
connected as an FT230X USB serial device at a fixed baud rate of 460800.
More details can be found by the links:
Website: https://spidriver.com/
Firmware: https://github.com/jamesbowman/spidriver
Protocol: https://github.com/jamesbowman/spidriver/blob/master/protocol.md
New documentation¶
An important note on documentation: all documentation is now contained in the git tree
in /doc directory and flashrom website is generated from it. Old wiki
website has retired and no longer supported, old wiki content can be browsed in web archive.
Hall of Fame¶
The flashrom HTML documentation (and web site) now includes an automatically-generated list of historical contributors, to acknowledge everybody who has made flashrom into what it is: Hall of Fame.
When building the documentation, the generate_authors_list Meson option will
cause the lists to be generated, requiring a runnable copy of Git on the system
and that the source tree being built is a Git working copy. If those
requirements are not satisfied or the option is disabled, the authors lists will
be replaced with placeholders unless the generate_authors_list option is set
to enabled in which case the build will fail if the requirements are not
satisfied.
CH341A and CH341B¶
The document CH341A/B gives information about
using CH341A and CH341B devices with flashrom programmer ch341a_spi.
Chip/chipset support added or updated¶
MX77U25650F
S25FL512S - probing function changed
S25FS512S
W25Q64JV-.Q - mark as tested for write-protect operations
W25Q256JV_M - marked as fully tested
W25Q256JV_Q - marked as tested for read/write/erase
W25Q128.W - marked as fully tested
W25Q256JW - added support for write-protect operations
XM25QH64A
Intel B150 and Q170 - marked as tested
libflashrom API updates¶
New API for progress reporting¶
The old flashrom_set_progress_callback function for requesting progress updates
during library operations is now deprecated. Users should call
flashrom_set_progress_callback_v2 instead, which also changes the signature
of the callback function. Specifically, new function type flashrom_progress_callback_v2
should be used from now on.
This new API fixes limitations with the old one where most users would need to define their own global state to track progress, and it was impossible to fix that issue while maintaining binary compatibility without adding a new API.
New API for logging and setting log level¶
New API flashrom_set_log_callback_v2 is added which allows the users to provide
a pointer to user data, the latter is managed by the caller of the API. New API also
introduces a new signature for log callback function, flashrom_log_callback_v2.
New API supports setting the log level for messages from libflashrom, flashrom_set_log_level.
The log callback is invoked only for the messages with log level less or equal than the one
requested (i.e. only for the messages at least as urgent as the level requested).
Old API flashrom_set_log_callback without user data continues to work as before and it is
supported as before. Old API supports flashrom_set_log_level as well.
New API for probing flashchips¶
New API for probing is added flashrom_flash_probe_v2 which can (if requested)
go through all known flashchips and find all matches. v2 returns the number of matches
found (or 0 if none found) and the list of names of all matched entries.
flashrom_flash_probe_v2 continues to support an optional parameter chip_name
if the caller want to probe for only one specific chip with given name.
Command line interface is now using flashrom_flash_probe_v2.
Old API flashrom_flash_probe is deprecated. It stays available “as is” for now,
however will be removed at some point in future. Users should switch to v2.
The main reason for deprecation is that it was returning incomplete information in case when multiple matching chips were found during probing. Specifically, the only info returned was error code of “multiple chips match” with no details of which are the matches and how many. This left the caller unable to proceed further. Consequently, even flashrom’s own command line interface was unable to use old libflashrom probing API, and had to maintain separate logic for probing.
New API to get list of supported programmers¶
New API flashrom_supported_programmers returns the list of all programmers that are
supported on a current run environment.
flashchips.c split into separate files by vendor¶
flashchips.c file was split into separate files per vendor. flashchips.c still exists in the source
code but it is much smaller and only contain “generic” chip entries.
With this, instead of one file flashchips.c we now have a flashchips/ directory which contains
all the files.
There are no changes to the usage, and everything that’s supported stays the same.
Misc updates¶
Extract cli_output declarations to a separate header
Extract programmer declarations to the correct header
Add Glasgow to supported serprog programmers documentation
Move SPI declarations from flash.h to spi.h
tests/chip: fix print format errors in gcc 14.2.0
cli: Remove array of flash contexts, use one active context instead
fmap: Skip unreadable regions when attempting to locate FMAP
jlink_spi: Increase delay on power-on feature from 10 to 100 millisec
cli_classic.c: Reimplement parse_wp_range
probe_flash: Introduce an error code for “other” probing errors
udelay: move into platform folder