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Free vs convenientFree vs convenientPosted Oct 4, 2009 13:32 UTC (Sun) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091)In reply to: Free vs convenient by nix Parent article: FSF offers "GNU Bucks" for finding nonfree works in free distributions From my very limited experience with these things, I think that vendors have improved a lot. I bricked my first ADSL router uploading the wrong file (which it did not check at all -- it was a .txt for goodness' sake!). The next one was cleverer. The current model has a recovery mode where pushing certain buttons upon startup it will load the provided file as a firmware image; that part (the "bootloader") cannot be overwritten so it is always available. IIRC the NSLU2 has that capability too, and I believe the iPhone has a similar panic mode. Modern network-connected devices know how to upgrade themselves, generally require signed images, and the panic mode is there just in case something really bad happens. This auto-upgrading somehow negates dlang's argument about him deciding when to upgrade his firmware, and again tips the scales towards the vendor.
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Free vs convenient Posted Oct 4, 2009 20:37 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Network-connected devices, sure. What about your hard drive firmware? Your
BIOS? Your disk controller? All of those have upgradable flashable firmware in my latest machine, and only one (the BIOS) provides any sort of recovery if things go wrong --- and *that* requires me to dismantle the computer, turn it on with the case off, and flip a jumper. Hardly convenient.
Hardly convenient Posted Oct 4, 2009 21:08 UTC (Sun) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] Scary, I didn't even know drives or controllers had updateable firmware. For these low-level components I am fairly sure it's as you say, a vanishingly small percentage of people ever reflash them. (And there isn't even the option to upload a binary blob from the OS to use them, since either the firmware is used before the OS or it would be needed to fetch the blob.)
Hardly convenient Posted Oct 4, 2009 22:46 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Both have updateable firmware. My Seagate drives require (ick) a Windows
program to update the firmware: my Areca RAID controllers can be updated via their relatively icky (Linux statically linked closed-source 32-bit x86 binary) web proxy, or I think via their BIOS-accessible interface (higher-end controllers also have an Ethernet port but I bloody hope you can't reflash the firmware over that). If the update goes awry you could potentially reflash back to the earlier version --- *if* you have it somewhere accessible with your disks behind a dead controller, and *if* the updater still works in that situation, and *if* the firmware lets you downgrade like that. (All these facts are, of course, undocumented.)
As you suggest, uploaded blobs are a lost cause in both cases, but
Free vs convenient Posted Oct 5, 2009 15:35 UTC (Mon) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]
I had a Yamaha SCSI 4416 CD-RW which I discovered had an emergency
firmware, after I made a mistake in my port of a firmware-writing utility. The emergency firmware could only speak SCSI and upgrade the firmware, it couldn't run the actual CDRW drive..
Free vs convenient Posted Oct 6, 2009 0:29 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Oh good, some vendors have thought of this then (though it sounds like
they still haven't thought of documenting it).
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