Recent development (unreleased) — flashrom v1.8.0-devel (git:v1.7.0-73-g50908357) documentation

# Recent development (unreleased)

This document describes the major changes that are expected to be included in the next release of flashrom and which are currently only available by source code checkout (see Building from source). These changes may be further revised before the next release.

## Multi-die flash chip support preparation

Feature is currently under development. Supporting multi-die flash chips. Added two new fields in the `struct flashchip` definition:

- `.die_size` - Size of a single die in kilobytes. Set for multi-die chips.

- `.die_select` - callback for die selection. Different vendors can use different opcodes and methods to select active dies.

This enables future support for multi-die flash chips without affecting existing single-die chip support. Chip definitions can now be prepared with die information ahead of time, and custom read/write functions can leverage this information for die-aware operations.

## New chip support

Added support for the ST M95320, a small 32 Kbit (4 kB) SPI EEPROM from the M95xxx family.

This chip has to be used in a slightly different way than most SPI flash chips, for two reasons:

- No probing / auto-detection. The M95320 has no `RDID` instruction and therefore no electronic signature to read back, so flashrom cannot identify it automatically. The chip must be selected explicitly on the command line and forced, for example:

      flashrom -p <programmer> -c M95320 --force -r backup.bin

  Because the chip cannot be probed, running a plain probe (for instance while probing every known chip) will report:

      Probing for ST M95320, 4 kB: failed! flashrom has no probe function for this flash chip.

  This message is expected and simply means the chip cannot be detected on its own; it does not indicate a hardware or connection problem. Use `-c M95320 --force` to talk to the chip.

- 2-byte addressing. The M95320 uses a 16-bit (2-byte) address for its read and program instructions instead of the usual 24-bit (3-byte) address.

Note that on this chip only reading has been verified on real hardware so far while write and erase are implemented but untested.

## New feature flags

- `FEATURE_ADDR_2BYTE` -- Marks a chip that uses a 16-bit (2-byte) address in its read and program instructions rather than the default 24-bit (3-byte) address. This is used by small SPI EEPROMs such as the ST M95320 (parts up to 64 KiB in the M95xxx family). When set, `spi_prepare_address()` emits only two address bytes.

## New programmers

- `fault` -- A fault injection programmer that wraps an existing backend (e.g. `dummy`) and injects deterministic, reproducible faults. Supports bit corruption, short reads, write failures, write lies (silent no-ops), and partial writes. Uses a seeded PRNG for reproducibility. Intended for testing verification logic and retry mechanisms under realistic failure conditions.