The switch connects to the write protect pin of the flash chip. The function of that pin is a bit awkward, it does not just flat out write protect the whole chip, as one would probably assume, but it prevents the write protect flag being remove from write protected pages. This flag is something that the flashing software can set during writing to the chip. All unprotected pages stay unprotected regardless of the state of the WP pin.
So this means that the flashing software needs to support protecting the flashed pages. And here is the problem, we currently use ‘flashrom’ for all of that and this does not (yet) support protecting pages - as far as I know at least.
Cheers
nicole