On 05/17/2016 12:44 PM, Jon Masters wrote:

1). During development of a platform, it is much easier to debug
problems with tables if you can test replacement ones without having to
respin the firmware. In the server world, you usually don't have the
firmware source code, so to get it respun could be days-weeks even if
you are working with the authors closely. We have practically used this
feature on a number of platforms already and it will continue.

For example, on one platform we were unable to fully boot RHEL(SA) due
to a bug in one of the ACPI tables. But I was able to boot the system to
a ramdisk containing a uuencode library and then write out the content
of the tables over the serial port, then decompile/patch/recompile, and
override replacement tables on the system. Then we beat the vendor up
with the fixes and the official firmware was corrected.


-- 
Computer Architect | Sent from my Fedora powered laptop