Danger Will Robinson! We found certain (won't name them) PCI-X cards that consume HUGE amounts of power when held in RESET. Of course YMMV, but keeping the motherboard in reset for long periods of time CAN be detrimental...
Alan Mimms, Senior Architect F5 Networks, Inc. Spokane Development Center 1322 North Whitman Lane Liberty Lake, Washington 99019 v: 509-343-3524 f: 509-343-3501
-----Original Message----- From: linuxbios-bounces@linuxbios.org [mailto:linuxbios-bounces@linuxbios.org] On Behalf Of Stefan Reinauer Sent: Tuesday, April 11, 2006 10:27 AM To: Duncan Laurie Cc: Frank Rust; linuxbios@linuxbios.org; Lu,Yinghai Subject: Re: [LinuxBIOS] Is this system supported? SUN FIRE X4100
* Duncan Laurie dlaurie@google.com [060411 18:31]:
This one is different; considerably more invasive but useful. It does not care what (if anything) is currently loaded in the system bios flash and will read and write directly via the LPC bus. Since LPC is no good at sharing this requires the system to be held in reset to guarantee it is idle or all sorts of strange things will happen.
Nice! Keeping the system in reset is nothing evil, as a system with a corrupted bios won't do much anyways :)
The downside is you cannot do a BIOS upgrade via the SP through an in-band method since you would lose communiation. (tricks could be done to load the image first and flash later but then you lose notification of failures, etc etc) It is still possible to do a direct BIOS flash on the system with the right (DOS) tool.
or probably with the LinuxBIOS flashrom utility.
Stefan