Order of the Butterfly
Posts: 301 from 2003/2/24
From: Genesi
Here is the hard sell on the firmware:
You are never going to know what the difference is between board revisions, and in any case it is not guaranteed to give you any hint by knowing what firmware revision is on it. Please do not "ask gently" or ask at all, as you will be met with what amounts to a disappointing response.
The public differences: 2B4 and below used a Winbond clock chip. 2B5 and above use an ICS clock chip (see Power.org public specifications).
Users should run the latest publically available firmware, if the one already installed on your system is not in fact much newer. For most Pegasos II owners this is the firmware that came with the machine. For the rest it's on the bplan site - but if you didn't upgrade already you probably broke your system doing setenv in firmware anyway :D
There is no real intrinsic value to knowing how many hardware/software revision/combinations there are - in a very short time there will be a "1.3" firmware, for Pegasos II if not also for Pegasos I too, and EFIKA, and the HDB, and everything else, and it will all be useless information. Dare I say you are wasting your time with a boring numbers game?
Matt Sealey, Genesi USA, Inc.
Developer Relations
Product Development Analyst