[ntp:questions] Flash 400 on all peers; can't get ntpd to be happy

Chris Adams cmadams at hiwaay.net
Sun Mar 13 20:03:48 UTC 2011


Once upon a time, Chris Albertson  <albertson.chris at gmail.com> said:
>On Fri, Mar 11, 2011 at 10:12 AM, Ryan Malayter <malayter at gmail.com> wrote:
>. have you ever audited the code of your BIOS? Or the firmware
>> on your chipsets, NICs, RAID cards, or disk drives? Your "control" of
>> a physical server is just as illusory as that of a Virtual Machine.
>
>Yes,  Linux, after the first boot block is loaded does not use any of
>that code, no BIOS calls are made from the OS, none of other ROMs
>either.  It's open Source so people read the code.

Nope, Linux doesn't magically replace all the firmwares.  You typical PC
has a multitude of processors, and you only (mostly) control what runs
on one class, the general-purpose CPU.  You don't control what runs on
the NIC, storage controllers (e.g. RAID), storage devices (disk drives,
DVD drives, etc.), video cards, etc.  Linux still has to deal with SMM
and ACPI that is not Open Source.

-- 
Chris Adams <cmadams at hiwaay.net>
Systems and Network Administrator - HiWAAY Internet Services
I don't speak for anybody but myself - that's enough trouble.




More information about the questions mailing list