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<!-- $Id: sparc.xml 43641 2006-12-29 05:23:38Z fjp $ -->
<sect2 arch="arm" id="arm-firmware-overview"><title>ARM firmware</title>
<para>
As already mentioned before, there is unfortunately no standard for
system firmware on ARM systems. Even the behaviour of different
systems which use nominally the same firmware can be quite different.
This results from the fact that a large part of the devices using the
ARM architecture are embedded systems, for which the manufacturers
usually build heavily customized firmware versions and include
device-specific patches. Unfortunately the manufacturers often do not
submit their changes and extensions back to the mainline firmware
developers, so their changes are not integrated into newer versions of
the original firmware.
</para>
<para>
As a result even newly sold systems often use a firmware that is based
on a years-old manufacturer-modified version of a firmware whose
mainline codebase has evolved a lot further in the meantime and offers
additional features or shows different behaviour in certain aspects.
In addition to that, the naming of onboard devices is not consistent
between different manufacturer-modified versions of the same firmware,
therefore it is nearly impossible to provide usable
product-independend instructions for ARM-based systems.
</para>
</sect2>
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