Re: LCC and blobs
On Thu, Dec 16, 2004 at 09:20:14PM -0500, Brian Thomas Sniffen wrote:
> Peter Van Eynde <pvaneynd@mailworks.org> writes:
>
> > Brian Thomas Sniffen wrote:
> >> No; the hardware is damaged. No driver can drive that. The driver
> >> you have is a driver for Foomatic Quxer cards. You don't have a
> >> Foomatix Quxer; you have a broken pile of junk.
> >
> > So here you argue that because the firmware is gone the hardware is
> > broken, correct?
>
> No, I argue that because you've pried chips off the board, the
> hardware is broken.
Er, no. Flash can be overwritten with invalid data (eg. nulls or interrupting
a flash process), rendering drivers that expect a working flash to not work.
It's not correct in the general case to say that "no driver can drive that";
some hardware can still be re-flashed to correct the data, so a driver that
does have a (usually redundant) copy of the firmware and code to upload it
can, in fact, drive the device. However, unlike non-flash devices that need
the firmware uploaded every time, the driver is still useful without it.
Whether or not the "misflashed hardware is a broken device" analogy is
bought, the fact remains that many copies of the hardware still do function,
having working firmware. The existance of non-working hardware is irrelevant.
--
Glenn Maynard
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