" If it’s your boot drive, no luck there and you can try flashing while it’s mounted."
Err no, that's when you boot from USB stick. Or do it from initramfs. Or anything, other than modifying the firmware of a drive you are running from.
Err no, that's when you boot from USB stick. Or do it from initramfs. Or anything, other than modifying the firmware of a drive you are running from.
Firmware Updates (0x16): 3 Slots, no Reset required
Anyone sane implementing the firmware flashing algorithm will either:
1. Just reject all IO requests from the point of the firmware update onwards. The system will see the drive disappear, but since you are using a journaling filesystem, it will be like you just pulled the power, and no data corruption will happen.
2. Complete all IO requests before the update, then update, then continue requests as before.
3. Save the firmware update, but only apply it at next powerup of the drive.
Netapp filers do this; they update disk firmware online by installing it and then just rebooting the drive. The RAID controller/software handles the momentary interruption with zero issues, but even without redundancy an OS can handle a drive disappearing for a few moments.
If the power cycle is controlled, then the kernel can be reasonably sure that the re-appearing device is the same one. File handles wouldn't really be affected as long as the mounted filesystem can resume IO after the device reappears.
Most likely you'd still want to use a RAID scheme and/or data checksumming as an extra layer to ensure data integrity though.