Re: Social Contract GR's Affect on sarge
On Mon, 26 Apr 2004, Stephen Frost wrote:
> entirely opposed to it either. Especially if the firmware is just
> assembled assembly for a specific processor that could be disassembled.
> I'm not very familiar with firmware though, is virtually all firmware
> compiled C code or is alot of it assembly or what?
It varies.
Sometimes it is C code running in a bare bones environment, or it is
running on something like VxWorks.
Sometimes it can be truely weird stuff like FPGA configuration data. This
is becoming more common as people are just embedding mini-FPGA like blocks
in their ASIC's.
Sometimes it is assembly code assembled using an assembler the vendor
built just for the logic they designed.
Sometimes it is something else entirely - ie the intel microcode
patches.
Pretty much everything has embedded 'firmware' of one kind or anyother.
Sometimes you don't see it, because it is in flash or ROM'd into the chip.
Though, often it ends up in a driver primarily to save on the cost of
flash and/or to ease updating it to new versions.
The ocurrance of this is only going to increase with time..
Jason
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