[OLPC-devel] Requirements for a field BIOS reflashing tool.

[Ronald G Minnich]

Stefan Reinauer wrote:

> Many modern motherboards secure their flash write lines using a GPIO 
> that has to be set prior to writing, otherwise not even the flash rom
> identification service will work. 

I think the GPIO is less safe than the keyboard, however, some 
combination of the two might be ok.

Something like:
flash write requires a long pass phrase typed into the flash program, 
which will then enable GPIO; AND you have to hold down the keyboard, 
with some combination, for 5 seconds.

We could further vary the enable sequence from the keyboard, make it a 
different character for every 100K systems?



> Running an unchecked firmware image is frivolous. Is there any chance we
> can stuff a "fallback" and "normal" image in the development and/or
> production chips with LinuxBIOS?  

We can, but we'll be out of room again :-(


>The fallback image should just be good
> enough to flash the bios from an external device (floppy, cd, usb stick,
> whatever the final version of the OLPC will allow) as we don't want two
> Linux images in flash under any circumstances.

I like it, but it puts us back where we were when we only had 512kb 
flash. I am still a bit sorry that we did not try to squeeze into 512k, 
so we could do a fallback ulta failsafe sort of thing. We can think 
about this.

ron