Re: [gentoo-user] How to flash an LSI SAS controller from IR to IT mode on linux with sas2flsh

Surprising that you can do that on a VM, clearly they don't provide much security if you can do such powerful things as flashing firmware, pretty easy to write a VM virus that flashes all the flash memory to random, 1, or 0 values that would totally brick a server and add in cards as well as hard drives.  it may be hard to reverse engineer most firmware, but that doesn't mean it's hard to corrupt.

In any case, sorry for your' problems.  thumb drives of 32G and less are really cheap now that the huge ones are available  (got a 16GB for <$7).  I'm ridiculously poor by american standards (still fighting SS...., thank god i got public housing!) and i bought a couple in the last 6 months.

manufacturers are starting to make firmware upgrades for linux, and i believe there is a program that can be used to install dos firmware upgrades from linux.  I Actually have 2 machines with both windows and linux firmware updates available, but they are servers (13 yr old, not surprisingly they were free!).  i've become interested in servers as they depreciate quickly and tend to be built like tanks (though they are equally heavy).


mad.scientist.at.large (a good madscientist)
--
God bless the rich, the greedy and the corrupt politicians they have put into office.   God bless them for helping me do the right thing by giving the rich my little pile of cash.  After all, the rich know what to do with money.

Regarding uefi, i never believed in it, long before an asian asus manufacturer was kind enough to leave their ftp server open, and someone found the master key there and let the world know.   besides which, it's pretty hard to produce an encryption algorithm that will still be hard to break in 5-10 years due to ever increasing processing power, especially if people find some flaws in the algorithm or implementation. 

I suppose that since it's a card you want to flash you might be able to do it on a friends machine, possibly.  Good luck.


20. Mar 2018 13:02 by Taiidan@×××.com <mailto:Taiidan@×××.com>:


>         On 03/19/2018 08:02 PM, > mad.scientist.at.large@××××××××.com <mailto:mad.scientist.at.large@××××××××.com>>     wrote:
>>       >> A virtual machine is useful largely because it isolates the VM from the real hardware, therefore it's not likely you can update firmware from a VM (you really shouldn't be able to).>>
>     Actually you can update firmware from a VM, I have done it many    times on many different PCI-e cards and I already updated the IR    mode firmware to the latest version in a linux VM (but you need DOS    to go IR>IT)
>
>     It is part of the reason as to why SR-IOV was created besides the    performance benefits you also get security benefits with restricted    registers and the inability to flash a malicious firmware from a    guest if you attach a VF to the VM instead of the PF.
>
>     I don't have any UEFI machines as I hate UEFI (all my machines run    coreboot with the grub payload)
>
>>       >> The reason they still want us to upgrade with dos is it's a lowest common denominator, i.e. every one has it or can get it (freedos).  it also helps that it's a minimal enviroment.In any case, I suggest you run a REAL freedos on a Real machine, so that you can update real not virtual firmware.  i.e. no Virtual Machine.>>
>     The issue is not being able to use linux as well and having a bare    metal freedos won't help my disk driver issue there still won't be a    way to load the files.
>