Pawn BIOS Dumping Tool

Copyright 2014-2024 Google LLC.

Disclaimer: This is not an official Google product (experimental or otherwise), it is just code that happens to be owned by Google.

What is it?

Pawn is a tool to extract the BIOS firmware from Intel-based workstations and laptops. The name is a play on an internal tool that is also named after a chess piece.

How to Build

Dependencies:

• Linux on x86_64 (uses /dev/mem). FreeBSD might also work.
• GCC >= 7 or Clang >= 7
• CMake >= 3.14
• Ninja or GNU Make

To build:

mkdir -p build && cmake -S . -B build
cmake --build build/

The resulting binary can be found in build/pawn/pawn.

Usage

The following command will extract the BIOS firmware and save the image to bios_image.bin:

sudo build/pawn/pawn bios_image.bin

Note: When running a Linux kernel > 4.8.4, make sure that either CONFIG_IO_DEVMEM=n is set or that you've booted with the iomem=relaxed boot option.

After extraction, you can then use other tools like UEFITool to process the firmware image further.