Upgrading the Software in Place
Most software systems must be upgraded at some point in their lifetime for a variety of reasons: bugs and security vulnerabilities are found and fixed, new features are required, and so on. Embedded applications are no exception. However, if upgradeability is not designed in from the beginning, the upgrade process will be difficult or even impossible. For instance, unless you want your customers to do minor surgery on your embedded device, you shouldn’t ship the software in ROM. The only way to replace software that’s burned into ROM is to replace the ROM chip. Also, if you only have enough memory-plus-storage in the device to actually run the application, upgrading is very dangerous because there’s no good ...
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