On Fri, 13 Oct 2000, Peter Jay Salzman wrote:
> there are some very interesting and innovative new options. one of them
> talks about being able to update firmware on your CPU. sounds really cool,
> but i'm not sure if i'm interpreting this correctly. can you "flash" the
> CPU the way you can a bios chip? i've never heard of such a thing; doesn't
> seem possible.
Your CPU would have to support it, of course; no point updating firmware
that doesn't exist. IMO, this could mean one of a coupla things:
1. Support for dynamic updates to your CPU's microcode (but is this even
possible?) I'm not even sure WHY you'd want to do this; microcode isn't
the sort of thing that requires a lot of updates.
2. Support for Crusoe-like chips that do a lot of stuff in firmware. This
actually makes more sense (to me)--nobody expects Transmeta to put
out a bug-free chip at first; it's a brand new chip design. The ability
to dynamically update the firmware in order to hot-fix bugs was, IIRC, why
they went the firmware route in the first place. But precious little good
a new firmware release does you if you can't install it, hence the kernel
option.
All just speculation, mind you.
--nicole twn
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