3C905C Flashing with romutil

[Marty Connor <mdc@thinguin.org>]

On 1/18/2000 6:19 AM mkli@netway.at Martin Klingler wrote:
>thanks very much for this new release 4.4.1, my diskless knots in my 
>cluster are now booting from disk.

Great! Glad it works for you.

>I am using the 3C905C-TX-M NIC, so I followed the mailinglist 
>for the last two weeks very closly. The next step for me would be
>flashing the PROM on the NIC. Did anybody have success with that?
>Does romutil do the job?

It does now. :-)

The version of romutil in Etherboot 4.4.1 seems to be 3C905B specific. 
The 3C905C cards use a different Flash Memory chip (the AT49BV512 chip).

I downloaded the datasheet for the AT49BV512 flash memory chip 
(http://www.atmel.com/atmel/acrobat/doc1026.pdf) and modified romutil.c 
to use byte-mode programming rather than sector mode, and got rid of 
extra commands.

See http://www.thinguin.org/ for the updated romutil code.  There is now 
a cromutil.c and a bromutil.c file, updated Makefile and docs.

I have successfully backed up and restored the 3C905C ROM code, and also 
have flashed it with Etherboot code and booted a thin client from it 
(http://www.ltsp.org/ has a nice sharable package for thin clients, btw 
:-).  

Someone who really understands the 905 series (Greg?) should take a look. 
 It's pretty bare-bones code, but it seems to do the job.  I tried using 
the 3Com MBAFLASH.EXE tool, but it won't flash arbitrary code into the 
device (can't blame them for that!).  I'm sure the two utilities could be 
merged by just checking the Product ID code and acting accordingly.

I notice that the Intel EEPRO100 uses the same Flash Memory chip as the 
3C905C.  Assuming they don't protect the chip, we might be able to make a 
utility for that one too.  Has anyone tried?  Maybe Intel has a util that 
will allow arbitrary flashing of code. A peek inside might give the 
ioaddr offsets.

Anyway, Martin, let us know how it goes for you.

Regards,

Marty

---
   Name: Martin D. Connor
US Mail: Entity Cyber, Inc.; P.O. Box 391827; Cambridge, MA 02139; USA
  Voice: (617) 491-6935, Fax: (617) 491-7046 
  Email: mdc@thinguin.org
    Web: http://www.thinguin.org/


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