On Wed, 2010-09-29 at 00:41 +0200, Carl-Daniel Hailfinger wrote:
[adding flashrom@flashrom.org to CC, senders will be whitelisted after a short delay]
On 28.09.2010 19:59, Ben Hutchings wrote:
Network and disk controllers normally have at least some firmware in flash to support their use as boot devices. [...]
Currently the sfc network driver is optionally combined with an MTD driver (CONFIG_SFC_MTD) which exposes all upgradable firmware and configuration partitions in flash. This works nicely in kernels with MTD enabled, but since MTD is mainly used in embedded systems with on-board flash it is often disabled in distribution kernels and custom kernels alike. This leaves users of sfc unable to upgrade firmware without rebuilding the kernel or booting some other distribution. The lack of widespread MTD support is a regular cause of support requests.
There are two main alternatives I'm aware of:
Use the ethtool ETHTOOL_SEEPROM [...]
Use the ethtool ETHTOOL_FLASHDEV command [..]
Of course these are both specific to network devices; it seems deisrable to have a more general convention for online firmware upgrades. MTDs clearly are more generally applicable, and pretty much every computer does have flash storage for firmware and boot configuration, so perhaps it should be treated as more of a standard feature?
Given that the flashrom utility http://www.flashrom.org/ (GPLv2) supports flashing many network cards, SATA/PATA controllers, graphics cards, and of course the main system firmware/BIOS/EFI, and it does that from userspace without any kernel support,
[...]
I'm looking for a clean solution, not a hack.
Ben.