I’ve been meaning to write about this for a while and since it’s come up recently (Write Intent Bitmaps, Software RAID) I figured now would be a good time. Basically what the write-intent bitmap does is keep track of which blocks are being used so that in the event that a resync is needed (power failure, kernel crash, disk temporarily offline) only the blocks that are out of sync are copied. This drastically improves resync times. Of course there is a downside.

I hesitate to select flashrom because it is a program that should be used with the utmost caution and because it doesn’t yet work as well as I would like. However, it shows great promise and offers functionality that is currently lacking in Linux. Quite simply it is an open source application that allows the user to flash their BIOS from Linux. Usually, to flash the BIOS of a machine I tend to use a boot cd to load a DOS environment from which I can run the BIOS update utility. With flashrom I can flash the system BIOS from Linux and reboot at my leisure.