I have backed myself into a corner with a new system I'm building. The current BIOS is completely broken (it locks up after drawing half the screen if you enter settings during POST, locks up if any EUFI device is present in the system, etc). I am able to boot into a semi-functional linux environment using a GRUB cdrom.In researching alternative ways to flash this bios, one option I turned up was the Linux based utility flashrom.I am able to run the flashrom utility and it finds the chipset and memory space that I need to write. However when I try to either read or write (-r/-w args), I am greeted with a message saying the utility is unable to read from the chipFound chipset AMD SB7x0/SB8x9/SB9x0. Enabling flash write... OK.  Found Winbod flash chip W25Q64.V (8192 kB, SPI) at physical address 0xff800000.  Reading old flash chip contents... FIFIO pointer corruption! Pointer is 0, wanted 3  Something else is accessing the flesh chip and causes random corruption.  Please stop all applications and drivers and IPMI which access the flash chip.  FAILED.I have been unable to locate what software, drivers, kernel modules or other devilry has the device open. What do I need to shut down or how can I find the culprit?
What software or drivers do I need to shut off to use `flashrom`?
drivers;bios
Even with the many great suggestions from slm and others, I was never able to flash this BIOS from on the system. In the end I removed the chip and flashed it externally using flashrom on a Raspberry Pi with a homemade EEPROM attachment. Having gotten the system back to a fully working state, I can now flash it internally using the same procedure that was failing per my original question.In other words, the problem was what the error message reported. The problem was the BIOS being so borked that the system was not working according to spec in spite of having booted linux.