[opendtv] Re: Over the air updates for STB's
- From: Kon Wilms <kon@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 10 Dec 2004 07:17:29 -0800
On Fri, 2004-12-10 at 09:18 -0500, Craig Birkmaier wrote:
> How does the availability of local cache storage impact these upgrades?
>
> It seems that it would be trivially easy to store an image of the
> flash memory on the hard disk, and to build the image of an update on
> that disk as well. One might even be able to use the volatile system
> RAM to store a temporary image, although this would be vulnerable to
> a power glitch.
The availability impacts the reliability of the upgrade.
RAM upgrades? Good luck to you. What if you are delivering the update at
a slow datarate? Its more reliable to write packets to a reserved
non-volatile area so that one doesn't have to start receiving the file
all over again. Otherwise you store it in RAM and hope nothing happens
to the box for the xx minutes it takes to download, process, and upgrade
the flash. Its also easier to force a manufacturer to reserve flash in
manufacturing than RAM. And then there's the other problems like.. what
if a box has a memory allocation bug? Can't upgrade it. Then the
finger-pointing starts. :)
Last time I checked those non-PVR STBs which are in the majority didn't
have a harddrive. I agree a harddrive makes it trivial but once again -
if its a PVR harddrive are you guaranteed xx space on it. Some content
provider over which you have no control could just fill the sucker up.
You would have to make an update partition on the drive. Also, you would
still want to store the factory image on flash, incase the harddrive
failed.
Cheers
Kon
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