Patent ID: 7243347

Claim:
A method of maintaining firmware revisions in a data processing system, comprising: imaging the current firmware of at least one peripheral device associated with the system into a portion of non-volatile storage accessible to the a system; during a boot sequence, comparing the firmware versions on each of the at least one peripheral devices to the corresponding versions imaged in the system's non-volatile storage; and responsive to detecting a mismatch between a device's firmware version and the corresponding imaged version, updating the firmware of the respective peripheral device to conform to the imaged version; wherein imaging the current firmware includes partitioning the system storage into at least a user partition and a service partition and storing the firmware images in the service partition; wherein the service partition is implemented according to the Protected Area Run Time Interface Extension Services (PARTIES) specification; and wherein updating the firmware includes booting into the service partition and using the service partition to validate the firmware versions of each of the peripheral devices.