can't update the bios on this PE1750, same after reboot.

[Michael E Brown]

On Wed, May 09, 2007 at 03:22:36PM +0200, Martin Hamant wrote:
> Probably runlevel 2 if I want to get an SSH port opened and issue
> #update_firmware --yes :D

The --yes is undocumented so that people have to read the screen rather
than blindly hitting enter. :)

> 
> sshd            0:off   1:off   2:on    3:on    4:on    5:on    6:off
> 
> Q: why do this process needs absolutely contiguous memory ? Where is
> the limitation exactly ? Because on this server, we have 2Gbytes of
> memory, and after a fresh start i'm pretty sure that there is 1-4 Mbytes
> of contiguous memory :/ (depends what we call "free", ok ^^)

You have to understand how BIOS update works. Right now, we use a
process called RBU - Remote BIOS Update. (Yeah, I dont know why it is
called 'remote', either.)

The way RBU works is that we place the BIOS image in system RAM, set a
bit in CMOS, and reboot. On reboot, the BIOS sees the CMOS bit set as a
signal to do BIOS update. It scans RAM to find the BIOS update. It then
does the update. Since BIOS runs in real-mode and doesnt have the
kernel's old virtual mapping tables, it really has to find the BIOS in
contiguous *physical* memory.

There is a new RBU type called "Packet Mode". This is a new BIOS feature
in which it scans memory for BIOS image "packets", which are
configurable sized, numbered and stamped image chunks that the BIOS can
re-assemble into the original BIOS image. This mode really helps because
you no longer need physically contiguous memory. Not all systems support
Packet Mode, though, because it requires extra code space in the
limited-sized BIOS real-mode segment.
--
Michael