Flashing ROMs

Overview

ROM flashing was added to DPCIManager version 1.1 using resources from the coreboot project. The basic method comes from the DirectHW subproject and its maintainer, which requires building three packages: DirectHW, pciutils, and flashrom.

Usage

Flashrom as used in DPCIManager requires administrator privileges only to load the DirectHW kext, while they are normally required when both loading the kext and running flashrom. The kext is loaded first, then checked in order to run flashrom and either read or write the BIOS ROM; when DPCIManager closes, the kext is unloaded and deleted. This method allows reading the ROM, modification, then rewriting while only authorizing once.
The DPCIManager release contains additional code not in the repository to check the integrity of the included binaries. If the bundled flashrom or DirectHW kext were modified since compilation, the app will refuse to load.
Any dmidecode errors are harmless and add no functionality to flashrom in normal usage.