Dell Seagate SSHD Firmware Update on Linux

• Fedora 20 kernel only just started working correctly with most of the devices installed.
• Dell 1550 (Broadcom BCM4352) WiFi had to be replaced with an Intel® Dual Band Wireless-AC 7260, since kmod-wl doesn’t actually support all capabilities of the card and it refuses to work with half of APs in the wild.
• Declared support RHEL 6, 6.4 is just that – declared: 2.6 kernels do not really support Haswell hardware, especially the mobile one.
• RHEL 7 kernel is too old (3.10) to properly support Haswell graphics (Intel Graphics Stack is on 3.15 already) and RHEL7 altogether appears buggier than even Fedora 20.
• ATI should be set on fire for its quality of Linux drivers: kernels above 3.13 are not supported.
• etc

Booting Fedora, inserting the USB flash and looking inside we find something along these lines:

[arcivanov@aimobile-sm SEABOOT]$ ls -la
total 80
drwx------  4 arcivanov arcivanov 16384 Dec 31  1969 .
drwxr-x---+ 3 root      root         60 Jul 29 21:25 ..
drwx------  3 arcivanov arcivanov 16384 Jul 29 21:28 boot
-r--r--r--  1 arcivanov arcivanov 32256 Jul 29 19:46 ldlinux.sys
drwx------  2 arcivanov arcivanov 16384 Jul 29 19:46 stelogs
[arcivanov@aimobile-sm SEABOOT]$ ls -la *
-r--r--r-- 1 arcivanov arcivanov 32256 Jul 29 19:46 ldlinux.sys

boot:
total 14976
drwx------ 3 arcivanov arcivanov    16384 Jul 29 21:28 .
drwx------ 4 arcivanov arcivanov    16384 Dec 31  1969 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 arcivanov arcivanov  2103360 Jul 29  2013 STXbzImage
drwx------ 2 arcivanov arcivanov    16384 Jul 29 20:24 syslinux
-rw-r--r-- 1 arcivanov arcivanov 13165208 Jul 29  2013 tinycore_Seagate.gz

stelogs:
total 32
drwx------ 2 arcivanov arcivanov 16384 Jul 29 19:46 .
drwx------ 4 arcivanov arcivanov 16384 Dec 31  1969 ..

STXbzImage is a Linux kernel.
tinycore_Seagate.gz looks promising.

[arcivanov@aimobile-sm SEABOOT]$ cp boot/tinycore_Seagate.gz ~
[arcivanov@aimobile-sm SEABOOT]$ cd ~
[arcivanov@aimobile-sm ~]$ gzip -d tinycore_Seagate.gz 
[arcivanov@aimobile-sm ~]$ file tinycore_Seagate 
tinycore_Seagate: ASCII cpio archive (SVR4 with no CRC)

Ah, just a CPIO archive. I can work with that.

[arcivanov@aimobile-sm ~]$ mkdir seaboot
[arcivanov@aimobile-sm ~]$ cd seaboot
[arcivanov@aimobile-sm seaboot]$ cpio -dvi < ../tinycore_Seagate
.
run
run/udev
tmp
tmp/aberr
tmp/98-tc.rules
init
var
var/run
var/run/utmp
[...]

Nice. So let’s take a look what’s inside, remembering that firmware is actually called “DEM6”:

[arcivanov@aimobile-sm seaboot]$ find -iname \*dem6\*
./root/stelogs/DEM6L.LOD
./root/stelogs/DEM6H.LOD

Yay again! Using Google we find that the tools is called SeaTools Express and hence “ste” is, probably, a common acronym.
Let’s use that knowledge:

[arcivanov@aimobile-sm seaboot]$ find -iname \*ste\*
./lib/modules/3.0.21.tcSeaKernel-03_12_05CORE_SG/kernel/drivers/net/phy/ste10Xp.ko.gz
./lib/modules/3.0.21.tcSeaKernel-03_12_05CORE_SG/kernel/drivers/scsi/stex.ko.gz
./lib/modules/3.0.21.tcSeaKernel-03_12_05CORE_SG/kernel/net/ipv4/netfilter/ipt_CLUSTERIP.ko.gz
./lib/modules/3.0.21.tcSeaKernel-03_12_05CORE_SG/kernel/net/netfilter/xt_cluster.ko.gz
./etc/udev/rules.d/60-persistent-input.rules
./etc/udev/rules.d/60-persistent-alsa.rules
./etc/udev/rules.d/60-persistent-serial.rules
./etc/udev/rules.d/60-persistent-storage.rules
./root/stelogs
./usr/bin/stecon.sh
./usr/bin/STECon

So, STECon is a console SeaTools Express binary and stecon.sh is a shell wrapper. Let’s look inside.

[arcivanov@aimobile-sm seaboot]$ cat ./usr/bin/stecon.sh 
#!/bin/sh
if [ $# -ne 0 ]; then
    LOGS="-USBSTELogs $1"
fi
/usr/bin/STECon  -exitpause -colorizePassFail $LOGS -scriptcab /root/FDLSG_LTO.cab FDLSG_LTO.xml
sync

Cool. Now let’s see who invokes this script:

[arcivanov@aimobile-sm seaboot]$ grep -rnw '.' -e "stecon.sh"
./usr/bin/oemshell.sh:148:         safeexecute stecon.sh $dataDirectory
./usr/bin/oemshell.sh:191:   safeexecute stecon.sh $dataDirectory
./usr/bin/oemshell.sh:195:   safeexecute stecon.sh $dataDirectory
./usr/bin/oemshell.sh:199:#for getting all log output using a command like: " 
    safeexecute stecon.sh | tee log.log "works really well, but after this and 
    before the press any key use the following sed command to remove the spinner.
grep: ./usr/bin/sudo: Permission denied
grep: ./usr/sbin/visudo: Permission denied

Looking inside oemshell.sh we find lots of blah but, importantly, these things:

• when launched MARKDOWN_HASH985179f13a12cbe578cc67ae6aa40a46MARKDOWN_HASH working directory is set to MARKDOWN_HASH205419cf9650806540ae0d7f5e6c3ebfMARKDOWN_HASH
• MARKDOWN_HASH91e816649910def834d48e0da7318e24MARKDOWN_HASH is also MARKDOWN_HASH205419cf9650806540ae0d7f5e6c3ebfMARKDOWN_HASH

Finally, let’s look at what STECon links to:

[arcivanov@aimobile-sm seaboot]$ readelf -d usr/bin/STECon 

Dynamic section at offset 0x5c01d4 contains 35 entries:
  Tag        Type                         Name/Value
 0x00000001 (NEEDED)                     Shared library: [libdl.so.2]
 0x00000001 (NEEDED)                     Shared library: [libstdc++.so.6]
 0x00000001 (NEEDED)                     Shared library: [libpthread.so.0]
 0x00000001 (NEEDED)                     Shared library: [librt.so.1]
 0x00000001 (NEEDED)                     Shared library: [libcryptopp.so.6]
 0x00000001 (NEEDED)                     Shared library: [libaio.so.1]
 0x00000001 (NEEDED)                     Shared library: [libexpat.so.1]
 0x00000001 (NEEDED)                     Shared library: [libcrypto.so.10]
 0x00000001 (NEEDED)                     Shared library: [libz.so.1]
 0x00000001 (NEEDED)                     Shared library: [libm.so.6]
 0x00000001 (NEEDED)                     Shared library: [libgcc_s.so.1]
 0x00000001 (NEEDED)                     Shared library: [libc.so.6]

Thus we will need to install MARKDOWN_HASH4f111a8bc55c40439b0fc1489371767cMARKDOWN_HASH and MARKDOWN_HASH3457a73e3029da7a16b93cee013ccc8fMARKDOWN_HASH.

That’s it, now to adapt the shell wrapper script for our purposes and we’re all set.