Re: NetBSD on embedded devices

[Herb Peyerl <hpeyerl%beer.org@localhost>]

> On May 17, 2017, at 5:43 AM, Jukka Marin <jukka.marin%embedtronics.fi@localhost> wrote:
> 
> 
> The firmware update process is what I'm mostly wondering about..

While I can’t help you with NetBSD/x86 specifically; the way we do this on ARM platforms is with u-boot.  You set up multiple firmware partitions.  Set one as the boot partition and update the firmware in the other partition.  After confirming that the firmware update is successful, unmount the partition, and set the u-boot environment to boot from the new partition.  Ideally the boot partitions will be read-only and you will have a read/write data partition (or two) and run those with some sort of journalling filesystem.    Should the latter become corrupted, you can have logic in your firmware to rebuild it or whatever.. 

It does appear that it’s possible to build u-boot for some x86 platforms though I’m not sure how environment variable storage works on that platform.  

Maybe you can find an x86 bootloader that will allow you to set variables from a running OS  (Grub?)