how do firmwares work?

[saprano]

for example all these ps3 games getting rumble because of a firmware upgrade. where does the information come from?and where does it get saved? on the harddrive? and like the hitachi bd 200 gigabytes, they said it would only need a firmware upgrade for ps3 to use it. how does all this work?

[jermwhl]

firmware is not a software update. It is code that is written into the hardware on the motherboard. Software updates are things like adding extra maps to a game or making patches for a game those would be stored on the hard drive.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firmware
good 'ol wiki

[olarmy96]

For firmware, usually there's a small flash memory chip on the motherboard where low-level code is stored in order to control the hardware. I'm not sure how the PS3 implements it, but when "flashing" the memory you always get a warning not to turn-off the power as that would interrupt the sequence and render the device unusable until it was serviced and the memory reset.

Originally Posted by saprano

for example all these ps3 games getting rumble because of a firmware upgrade. where does the information come from?and where does it get saved? on the harddrive? and like the hitachi bd 200 gigabytes, they said it would only need a firmware upgrade for ps3 to use it. how does all this work?

[Pictor]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firmware

[saprano]

Originally Posted by jermwhl

firmware is not a software update. It is code that is written into the hardware on the motherboard. Software updates are things like adding extra maps to a game or making patches for a game those would be stored on the hard drive.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firmware
good 'ol wiki

so does this ever run out of space to store the information?

[181]

Originally Posted by saprano

so does this ever run out of space to store the information?

No, firmware for a given chipset can be updated but almost always stays the same size. It overwrites the existing firmware.

For example, a circuit has a 256k non-volatile chip that contains firmware. When the hardware developer who designed the circuit needs to update the firmware, they will release a 256k file to flash onto the non-volatile chip. The entire firmware on the chip is overwritten with the new revision in this case.

Sometimes firmware is implemented to allow hardware developers to fix bugs in the physical circuitry and in the case of the PS3, allow for more features.

[Neo65]

Firmware used to be very simple and small things. Nowadays, firmware updates for iphones, PS3s, HDM players tend to be big monsters, full blown software that could be in the megabyte range. IE: they pretty much can be anything, including the linux OS and drivers, middleware, audio codecs, applications for disk navigation, new DRM, bug fixes, stuff they forgot to put in previously, etc etc etc.

It's not the old firmware that's just a few hundred bytes of sequencer binaries, these things nowadays are very BIG.