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The embedded long-term support initiativeThe embedded long-term support initiativePosted Oct 30, 2011 16:59 UTC (Sun) by andreasb (subscriber, #80258)In reply to: The embedded long-term support initiative by nix Parent article: The embedded long-term support initiative
BIOS flashing and recovery isn't as bad as it was 10 years ago. Just as an example, the Asus P5Q board I have here goes into an automatic recovery mode when it finds a bad BIOS checksum where it will attempt to find a BIOS image on CD, floppy or USB stick and flash it. Plus it has a menu driven BIOS flashing program in the main BIOS for regular upgrades.
Thankfully no comparison to the olden times when you had to boot DOS from floppy to do an upgrade and had to replace the flash chip (or at least reprogram it outside the system) when it got corruptedÂ…
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The embedded long-term support initiative Posted Oct 30, 2011 21:12 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Unfortunately, those olden times are still here for pretty much everyone but Asus (who remain excellent). e.g. the Tyan mobo in my server has a DOS flashing program and can only boot from CD, hard drive, or floppy. The machine doesn't have a floppy drive, so in order to flash the BIOS I have to find a way to get DOS onto a bootable CD, then find a way to interact with a headless machine in order to run the flashing program and tell it to get going... and if it goes wrong there is of course no reversion mechanism at all.
But why would you want an error recovery mechanism on great big servers as good as the one on J Random Nobody's desktop? :(
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