Yeah, I _so_ hope you are or will be wrong :) I don't know of any such firmwares at the moment (I didn't search a lot, though). But that would sure be a great thing to have (and support).
What good would it do to replace the known-good firmware of a hard drive with something home grown? What's the point?
Well - sometimes it's not known-good. I remember having a high-end server a couple of years back that *required a firmware upgrade* for the hard drives because re-syncing software raid partitions would just crash the machines.
So, did you get a (small) update from the vendor, or did you pull off the semi-impossible task of rewriting the thing from scratch :-)
Also, we might find that lower end drives that are 'slower' might only be artificially so, because the firmware is not as good as the higher end drives.
This doesn't solve a _problem_. Oh, and there are plenty of binary patches you can find around the web that do such things. They typically void your warranty *for a good reason* though.
And there is the whole Free as in Freedom aspect of course. I think 'because we want Free software' is a really good reason.
It would be nice to have, yes, but I think right now we have much bigger problems to solve first.
Even if having Free firmware for things like hard drives seems somewhat far fetched and difficult to achieve now, think of how the whole concept of a Free OS sounded back in the 80s.
Huh, there were plenty of free OSes back then. OSes were simpler of course.
Or a Free BIOS 10 years ago.
Same thing. But point taken (on x86 hardware).
On top of that, think DRM.
Yes, that thing again. With properly implemented DRM, you *cannot* replace the firmware, there is just *no way* to do that. Also, DRM is not a technical problem, and so cannot be fixed with a technical solution. It's a political and economical thing.
Say LinuxBIOS becomes really successful, and we basically kill EFI (and therefore, DRM in the bios).
EFI is not the only thing with DRM in the firmware -- not by a long shot.
Also, just look at those Linksys wireless routers (WRT54G). There's a whole ecosystem out there - people are doing things with them that were *never* anticipated by Linksys.
Yes. And none of those new things have anything to do (directly) with firmware changes.
Basically, having Free firmware for things like hard drives could allow some amazing innovation.
...and will lead to *lots* of bricked drives ;-)
And finally, 'because we can' is one heck of a good reason too.
I'm not convinced you can really; esp. not legally. But yeah, that "geek factor" would make me want to do it, sure -- except I see a HDD as 100% a black box with no internals that I care about (or want to care about). I also don't feel like reprogramming the ucode on CPUs, or even the ucode on a flash chip's internal controller, etc.
Segher