On Thu, Aug 09, 2018 at 05:21:42AM +0000, Joseph Mayer wrote: > Robert 2018-07-30 13:16:13: > > On Mon, 30 Jul 2018 22:07:12 +1000 Jonathan Gray <[email protected]> wrote: > > > If the hardware were less horribly designed it would come with firmware > > > on a dedicated flash chip. > > Oh come on, that would cost MONEY! > > Conceptually the presence of onboard writeable flash is problematic. > > In particular when there's no trustable, physical write-protection switch.
You seem to have missed the alternative to flash is storing the firmware on a storage device shared with the operating system. Which leads to us having to distribute it (which isn't possible for exynos and others), prevents supporting new systems with existing releases and ends with creating large numbers of install images instead of a single install image that works on all platform variants. When adding a battery backed rtc or flash is too expensive, I don't see anyone rushing to add physical write protection switches.
