Eventually, you may want to upgrade (or downgrade) the runtime firmware stored in NVRAM. To do this, you must locate a copy of the new .nvm file on the Atheros FTP site and download it to your host. You must then download the file to the device and ask the runtime firmware on the device to write the file to NVRAM. Writing firmware to NVRAM is also called “flashing the device”. Program int6k can be used for this purpose when runtime firmware is executing on the device.

Program int6k instructs runtime firmware to write to NVRAM but the firmware will behave differently depending on how it was loaded and started. The first time NVRAM is written by runtime firmware, the Factory PIB is created in NVRAM. The second time, the User PIB is created. Thereafter, the User PIB will be re-written each time. This preserves original factory settings and permits their restoration regardless of intervening parameter changes. This means that you should make an effort to get things right the first time.

# int6k  -i eth2 -P ../firmware/new.pib -N ../firmware/new.nvm -F
eth2 00:B0:52:00:00:01 Write Firmware to Device
eth2 00:B0:52:00:00:BE Wrote ../firmware/new.nvm
eth2 00:B0:52:00:00:01 Write Parameters to Device
eth2 00:B0:52:00:00:BE Wrote ../firmware/new.pib
eth2 00:B0:52:00:00:01 Flash NVRAM
eth2 00:B0:52:00:00:BE Flashing ...
eth2 00:B0:52:00:00:BE Started INT6000-MAC-3-3-3325-00-2443-20080414-FINAL-B

This example downloads a PIB file (-P) and an NVM file (-N) to the device then instructs the runtime firmware to write (or flash) (-F) both of them to NVRAM. Option -F always writes both to NVRAM but option -C can be used to write only one or the other or both.

Observe that options -P, -N and -F are all in uppercase. As a rule, uppercase options modify the device and lowercase options do not. One notable exception to this rule is -I which merely displays device identity.