Timeline for In what languages can firmware be written?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
4 events
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| Oct 20, 2020 at 14:49 | comment | added | Chris Stratton |
In practice, it's often traditional to refer to entire flash images of products (which internally contain filesystem organization) as "firmware". Even when they sit on something like EMMC or even a more traditional SSD in what is basically a PC, for example the case of the chromebook system image. If I backup a small system to a disk image, and dd that to another drive, is it now "firmware"? Or does it only count if I become a "manufacturer" by deploying the same image to several hardware units? Does my openwrt system image with squashfs count, but an armbian one with ext4 not?
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| Oct 20, 2020 at 14:44 | comment | added | TonyM | @ChrisStratton, (it'll get nowhere but...) the noun 'firmware' applies to an entire memory. The SSD is not hardware for storing software. It first stores filing system data structures which holds files. It is a file data storage device. Amongst the many, many types of files are executable files. So an SSD with file system cannot be firmware. One could drum up a fine line to argue over but there isn't really one in general engineering use. Large amounts of spoken language and nouns would not withstand such scrutiny and misappropriation, yet people manage to use them a lot without confusion. | |
| Oct 20, 2020 at 12:57 | comment | added | Chris Stratton | The laptop I'm using has an SSD... so by your argument, every piece of code persistently stored on it is "firmware"? Nope, that's a 1980's definition which no longer works. | |
| Oct 20, 2020 at 12:29 | history | answered | TonyM | CC BY-SA 4.0 |