Laptop Firmware flashing
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…
Laptops
Why laptops are difficult
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).
We have the goal of supporting every machine out there with flashrom, but ECs are particularly difficult besides blocking access and crashing:
Almost all ECs do not have public datasheets with programming information. Even if the programming information for an EC is public, the errata (often needed to use the EC for flashing) are not. Even if you have the datasheets with programming information (under NDA or by convincing the EC vendor to release them), the following problems…