Re: Does this help explain better?? ATA/IDE Thread

From: James Sutherland (jas88@cam.ac.uk)
Date: Tue Jul 25 2000 - 09:29:04 EST


On Tue, 25 Jul 2000, Stephen Frost wrote:

> On Tue, 25 Jul 2000, James Sutherland wrote:
>
> > Nope. Just have a normal system which does NOT allow the restricted
> > commands, and on the rare occasion I need to reflash the firmware or BIOS,
> > reboot with a disk which allows me to. That's how I do it now, and that's
> > how it should be done, IMO.
>
> Personally I'd like to see a Linux system *not* dependant on DOS for
> such things. The idea of a vendor-specific key to enable writing to the
> flash makes alot of sense to me. So does a jumper, but a jumper requires
> more manual intervention and probably taking down the machine, which is
> something I don't like doing. :)

WTF does DOS come in? If they wanted, they could use a Linux kernel with
the filter bypassed. I'd regard using Linux just to write some data to
memory as overkill, TBH; FreeDOS would probably make more sense for a lot
of things. However, I do NOT want to see this sort of highly unusual
action supported in the standard kernel: if you reflash your BIOS or
firmware, you will need to reboot anyway. Why not use a manufacturer's
boot disk/image? That way, they can't blame it on your anti-virus daemon,
your NIC, the kernel version you're running, etc.

James.

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