Re: [LinuxBIOS] Is this system supported? SUN FIRE X4100

[Alan Mimms]

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: [e-mail]
[mailto:[e-mail]] On Behalf Of Stefan Reinauer
Sent: Tuesday, April 11, 2006 10:27 AM
To: Duncan Laurie
Cc: Frank Rust; [e-mail]; Lu,Yinghai
Subject: Re: [LinuxBIOS] Is this system supported? SUN FIRE X4100

* Duncan Laurie  [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