wine users - Aug 2011 - BIOS Flash?

I know, I probably gave a lot of people heart attacks just from that title.

I'm not saying that I would actually try flashing my BIOS with WINE, I was
just wondering, purely out of theoretical curiosity, if it's even possible
to flash the BIOS by initiating an "exe" BIOS flasher from within
WINE.

I would suspect not, given that WINE "can't even" run Windows
drivers, and from my novice viewpoint, to do this would seem to be even lower
than a driver. That said, you never know.

However, WINE does manage memory, I've heard. Doesn't an exe BIOS
flasher (when initiated from Windows) just write some stuff to RAM and send some
reboot instruction to the processor or something? If WINE can manage a
program's memory, couldn't it write the BIOS flasher stuff to memory,
and then tell the operating system to send that reboot command to hardware? Or
are all WINE processes' memory housed within WINE's allocated memory,
and thus would take special WINE development to be able to add BIOS flashing
support?

If the dev team wanted to work on it, I would imagine there'd be a safe way
to try it out. Perhaps you can take a BIOS image file, copy it, and tell QEMU or
something to use the copy in "read and write" mode, install Linux in
QEMU (or whatever), put in your magic developing stuff, and try to flash the
BIOS. Of course you want to make sure you're running on an emulated
processor, not your real one. QEMU does have a -bios option to "set the
filename for the BIOS", and it looks like that's how the folks at
openfirmware are trying things out, though I don't know if QEMU supports
_writing_ back to the file.

Cheers,
Jake

On Wed, 2011-08-17 at 03:16 -0500, SpawnHappyJake wrote:
> I'm not saying that I would actually try flashing my BIOS with WINE, I
> was just wondering, purely out of theoretical curiosity, if it's even
> possible to flash the BIOS by initiating an "exe" BIOS flasher
from
> within WINE.
> 
That sounds like a job for FreeDOS rather then Wine, especially if the
flasher is nonpgraphical.


Martin

Hi,

2011-08-17 10:16 keltez?ssel, SpawnHappyJake ?rta:
> I know, I probably gave a lot of people heart attacks just from that title.
>
> I'm not saying that I would actually try flashing my BIOS with WINE, I
was just wondering, purely out of theoretical curiosity, if it's even
possible to flash the BIOS by initiating an "exe" BIOS flasher from
within WINE.
>
> I would suspect not, given that WINE "can't even" run Windows
drivers, and from my novice viewpoint, to do this would seem to be even lower
than a driver. That said, you never know.
>
> However, WINE does manage memory, I've heard. Doesn't an exe BIOS
flasher (when initiated from Windows) just write some stuff to RAM and send some
reboot instruction to the processor or something? If WINE can manage a
program's memory, couldn't it write the BIOS flasher stuff to memory,
and then tell the operating system to send that reboot command to hardware? Or
are all WINE processes' memory housed within WINE's allocated memory,
and thus would take special WINE development to be able to add BIOS flashing
support?
>
> If the dev team wanted to work on it, I would imagine there'd be a safe
way to try it out. Perhaps you can take a BIOS image file, copy it, and tell
QEMU or something to use the copy in "read and write" mode, install
Linux in QEMU (or whatever), put in your magic developing stuff, and try to
flash the BIOS. Of course you want to make sure you're running on an
emulated processor, not your real one. QEMU does have a -bios option to
"set the filename for the BIOS", and it looks like that's how the
folks at openfirmware are trying things out, though I don't know if QEMU
supports _writing_ back to the file.
>
> Cheers,
> Jake
there are native BIOS flashers under Linux, I wouldn't risk running
a BIOS flasher under Wine.

But two days ago, because there is no native firmware flasher for
Pioneer optical drives under Linux, and the Windows firmware
flasher failed under Wine, I tried DVRFlash on my Pioneer BDR-205
to upgrade from the factory shipped version 1.08 to 1.12.

http://dvrflash.rpc1.org/

The original flasher extracted the firmware but then the upgrade
procedure failed, maybe because the kernel filters certain ATA/SCSI
commands and I run it via Wine as my user.

Anyway, I used DVRFlash as root, and the firmware upgrade went flawlessly,
the drive works as expected. This was the command to detect the drive:

========================================# wine DVRFlash.exe 2>/dev/null

DVRFlash v2.7.7: Pioneer DVR firmware flasher
by Agent Smith, et al.,  Nov 2010

Commandline:
  C:\BDR205\DVRFlash_v2.7.7\dvrflash_win32\DVRFlash.exe

Device parameter was not given, detecting all DVR drives:

        Device : 3.0.0
        Vendor : PIONEER
         Model : BD-RW   BDR-205
      Revision : 1.12

        Status : RPC-2 (region locked)
        Region : none
       Changes : 5 region changes remaining
                 4 vendor resets remaining
                 state is 'Region not set'


Now run DVRFlash again, from the command prompt, using
one of the device(s) listed above as first parameter

Press the Return key to exit
========================================
The "2>/dev/null" part is needed otherwise the terminal is flooded
with
"fixme:aspi:SendASPI32Command ASPI: Partially implemented SC_HA_INQUIRY for
adapter 4."
messages.

The X.Y.Z in "Device : X.Y.Z" has to be passed to DVRFlash.exe, like:

# wine DVRFlash.exe 3.0.0 S1014001.112

DVRFlash has the advantage that it doesn't care for firmware version,
so downgrades are possible with it. This isn't allowed by the official
Pioneer firmware flasher.

Best regards,
Zolt?n B?sz?rm?nyi

Yeah, I knew it could be done with FreeDOS, but I now only have a vague memory
of native Linux BIOS flashing - I forgot about those.

I was just wondering out of theoretical curiosity if it is possible to initiate
a BIOS flasher with WINE. By no means am I asking if the BIOS could actually
flashed by running a program through WINE. I'm wondering if a BIOS-flashing
"exe" can be initiated from within WINE, similar to what you see when
you run one in Windows.
Last time I checked, it's impossible to actually flash your BIOS from within
Windows. Rather (from what I gather), when you run the BIOS-flashing exe from
Windows, stuff gets written to memory, and the computer is rebooted without
cutting power to the RAM, and it boots into what was put in memory. You can,
however, actually run the BIOS-flashing operation within a DOS.
So given that the BIOS-flasher is effectively its own operating system (when
initiated from Windows) when actually doing the flash, whether the flasher is
GUI based or CLI based has no relevance to whether WINE or FreeDOS is more
suited to running a BIOS flasher, unless it needs to be passed arguments at time
of initiation. Even then, WINE has a command prompt that would be able to handle
that.

I find it very interesting and delightful that it is possible to flash
non-system firmware (by that I mean any firmware other than the BIOS, EFI, etc.)
through WINE. Hmm. EFI updates. Now there's an interesting thought.

Cheers,
Jake