|         ║ baybal2 wrote 9 hours 23 min ago:
    |         ║ I looked up supermicro blade motherboards, and saw that the
    |         ║ chip was right near the IPMI chip's line to spi flash.
    |         ║
    |         ║ And prior to that, there were already persistent rumors in the
    |         ║ Chinese interney of certain Chinese mobos sending "weird
    |         ║ garbage on ICMP," and "BMCs that somehow boot and work with
    |         ║ their flash memory soldered off"
    |         ║
    |         ║ Remembering that, I might even suggest that this is not a
    |         ║ modchip that does something with signal on the go, but just a
    |         ║ very tiny flash chip that has the modded firmware.
    |         ║
    |         ║ Going further from that, to pack, say, 16 mB on a sandgrain
    |         ║ sized chip, the densities need to be like that of best flash
    |         ║ chips out there, which also means that they have access to last
    |         ║ gen flash fab.
    |
    |           ║ baybal2 wrote 5 hours 13 min ago:
    |           ║ An update on that theory: AST2400 has option for two SPI
    |           ║ memories, one main, one "recovery." [1] The recovery
    |           ║ overrides the primary if detected by default.
    |           ║
    |           ║ The place they put their "filter cap" is right on top the
    |           ║ empty TSOP8 pad for the recovery flash. And they probably
    |           ║ ordered the factory to sneak the traces just a little bit
    |           ║ more, or put hidden vias under it, or simply had somebody
    |           ║ very dexterous to solder it to pads with hair thin wires.
    |           ║
HTML+           ║ [1]: https://download.csdn.net/download/duanzhang512/1038...