Motherboards were produced with flash write-enable jumpers around the end of the last century, but my guess is that the cost savings of omitting the part and not requiring users to physically move the switch whenever reflashing BIOS, combined with what seems to be now perpetually buggy BIOSes needing constant updates, made them disappear. I think it's still a good idea, however.
Regarding the switches/jumpers, hardware is now complex enough to set up that a wakeup after suspend requires more data than what CPUs can store by themselves to revive memory without data loss. That data ends up in flash, so something needs to change in that area before a flash chip could be write protected with a jumper.
How much data is this? I thought it'd be stored in the CMOS NVRAM, which could be a better design.
CMOS NVRAM addresses 256 bytes (minus 16 for the clock).
Unfortunately that's not enough. Maybe things could be stored smarter, given that the data should have some structure, but the raw format is ~2000 bytes, IIRC.
Regarding the switches/jumpers, hardware is now complex enough to set up that a wakeup after suspend requires more data than what CPUs can store by themselves to revive memory without data loss. That data ends up in flash, so something needs to change in that area before a flash chip could be write protected with a jumper.
How much data is this? I thought it'd be stored in the CMOS NVRAM, which could be a better design.