BIOS

[Oliver Osburg]

Hi,

Flashing a large number of BIOSes is done regularly by members of the
linuxbios (http://linuxbios.org)or openbios(www.openbios.org) project. I
think Stefan Reinauer (stepan at coresystems.eu) can answer you a lot of
your questions.

Hth and kind regards,

Oliver



* Thomas Lange <lange at informatik.uni-koeln.de> [070809 10:42]:
> >>>>> On Thu, 9 Aug 2007 09:37:02 +0200, Henning Fehrmann <henning.fehrmann at aei.mpg.de> said:
> 
>     > we are interested in flashing a BIOS image and in manipulating the NVRAM of the motherboard 
>     > automatically.
> Wow. Do you really need this?
> 
>     > Unfortunately, using certain vendors, the access to the NVRAM is not straightforward.
>     > These vendors are offering DOS tools only, to write in the NVRAM, hence, we have to boot
>     > a DOS image and here starts the trouble.
> You can boot a DOS or floppy image using PXE. This is how a
> pxelinux.cfg looks like for booting a floppy image: 
> 
> default dos
> label dos
>  kernel memdisk
>  append keeppxe initrd=floppy.img
> 
> But AFAIR I had no success, because the dos flashing utilities seems
> to wanna have a real floppy, not a fake of a floppy.
> 
> 
>     > Optimally, using the DOS environment flashes the BIOS, sets the 
>     > NVRAM and sends a message to the FAI server to prepare the next boot of the clients for the
>     > installation.
> You could send a message to the faimond which can change the pxelinux configuration.
> 
> 
>     > In the worst case, the DOS environment is working autonomously and the FAI server is 'guessing'
>     > whether the BIOS is flashed or not, e.g., by analyzing the DHCP logs, but this is not what we really want.
> 
> Guessing if something has changed could easily be done using dmidecode,
> which will give you the version of the BIOS.
> 
> -- 
> regards Thomas
--
 *   Oliver Osburg   -  Administrator E-lingo PH Freiburg   *
 *  email: oliver.osburg at ph-freiburg.de phone: +49761682164 *
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