Supported hardware

External flashers/programmers

Silicon Image (SiI) SATA/IDE controllers:

Flashrom supports some SiI SATA controllers to reflash the flash attached to these controller cards, but it is also possible to use these cards to reflash other chips which fit in there electrically. Please note that the small number of address lines connected to the chip may make accessing large chips impossible.

3Com network cards:

Flashrom supports some 3Com network cards to reflash the flash attached to these cards, but it is also possible to use these cards to reflash other chips which fit in there electrically. Please note that the small number of address lines connected to the chip may make accessing large chips impossible.

FTDI FT2232/FT4232H-based USB-to-serial controllers:

Flashrom supports usage of external FTDI FT2232/FT4232H-based USB-to-serial controllers as SPI flashers.

FAQ (Frequently asked questions)

Unsupported Laptops/Notebooks/Netbooks

Laptops, notebooks and netbooks are difficult to support and we recommend to use the vendor flashing utility. The embedded controller (EC) in these machines often interacts badly with flashing, either by blocking all read/write access to the flash chip or by crashing (it may power off the machine or mess with the battery or cause system instability). More information is available here: Laptops.

Unsupported newer Nvidia chipsets

We support LPC/FWH flash on most Nvidia chipsets. Support for SPI flash on Nvidia chipsets should be working too with current versions. More information is here: Random notes/MCP SPI support