Brick Insurance

[ron minnich]

On 1/30/07, Mitch Bradley <wmb at firmworks.com> wrote:

> For now it won't help much because the EC code, which is a single point
> of failure, has to be upgraded so often due to changes from Quanta.

yes, this is another reason I did not bring it up earlier :-)

> When that settles down, we should do something along the lines that Ron
> suggests.  There are quite a few ways it can be done.  We'll need to
> consider the characteristics of the FLASH device and the likely failure
> modes to pick the most effective strategy.

What we've seen, over the last couple years, is that the most common
is flashus interruptus, due to things like power dropping, breaker
tripping, or, literally, people tripping on a power cable :-) Yes,
there's a battery, but ... maybe their battery has not charged for
some reason. Like mine :-)

Second is flashing the wrong image, while over-riding the "are you
sure" question.

Third is flashing a flash part that, at about that time, decides it
has done enough flashing for one lifetime, thank you. In spite of the
nominal guarantee of 100,000 cycles, we have parts that seem to last
about 10 cycles, as delivered from a vendor. We theorized that the
flash parts were recycled from some other application. These are the
worst, in many ways. If you have a fallback, at least you can live on
that backup image, and have a usable, albeit outdated, system.

thanks

ron