>>> 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 -- linuxbios mailing list linuxbios@linuxbios.org http://www.openbios.org/mailman/listinfo/linuxbios