[toast0]

> Does it revert the firmware to whatever it was shipped with (bugs and all)? Some vendors do, but most vendors do not.

I think that's the only reasonable thing to do. Have the original firmware either as an actual rom, or only writable with an enable jumper flipped; use a power on key sequence to boot from the original firmware, copy to normal firmware and reboot into normal firmware (which is now the original firmware). Run through that process during manufacturing to confirm it works.

Regularly test that all released firmware images, especially those in the original firmware slot can successfully upgrade (or at least not crash). Preferably include current firmware version in all requests so you can give workaround responses as needed when you figure out you broke something -- in the hostname is ideal, as you can use that to work around version specific certificate issues.

The reason a Blu-Ray player (or a video game console) might not let you go back to original firmware is to prevent reverting to earlier firmwares that allowed copied media, etc. For those, you probably want to have a 'safe' firmware slot (or two, ideally) that drives the factory reset process, and only reflash those slots on some updates (to reduce testing needs)

[gruez]

>I think that's the only reasonable thing to do.

But that'd also mean you need double the flash capacity, which drives up the BOM cost.

[phildenhoff]

Not necessarily. I worked on the team the managed the OS for an embedded hardware project (radio equipment) and our disk was partitioned four ways:

1. current operating system

2. previous operating system (and next, on upgrade)

3. data partition, shared across both current and previous OS

4. factory reset partition

That means if we needed to do a factory reset we could just load the firmware archive from the fourth partition onto the second partition and execute a normal upgrade, albeit to an older version. Since upgrade packages were small, maybe 500MB?, we could easily cut a little space from the rest of the partitions to make it fit without having to increase the flash capacity.

[WrtCdEvrydy]

Yeah, but this is 2020... the blu-ray drive needs a copy of React with node_modules sized at 26Gb :P

[gruez]

That might be feasible for high margin products, but definitely not for consumer products. Case in point: enthusiast motherboards (as in, not the ones used for prebuilts) cheaping out and using 16MB ROM rather than 32MB, forcing them to remove features to accomdiate extra code needed to support new CPUs

[Causality1]

Companies seem to care more about preventing users from rolling back firmware than they do about releasing firmware that works. I've had more than one device wrecked because it happened to be out of warranty when I installed a firmware update that ruined something important.

[jonhohle]

As the owner of the device, I couldn’t care less if reverting to earlier firmware has been exploited. Are device manufacturers making more money from customers or studios?

[toast0]

Device manufactures can't make money from customers if studios blacklist their players.

[flatiron]

Isn’t all this crazy when pirates can just download the damn movie with no problem. They are just punishing the paying customer. I have a plex server and have zero issues.

[toomuchtodo]

Copyright theater.