I've had this Dell E7470 laptop for a couple years.
Its my daily driver. I do a lot of work on it.
Lately I've been coding up a server in C++ meant to run a Pi Zero W.
I use the archlinuxarm root image and with qemu-user-static from a standard X86_64 arch Linux system I arch-chroot into the archlinuxarm root filesystem to compile the builds for testing them on actual hardware.
This last time I ran a $this->bbcode_second_pass_code('', 'pacman -Syu') in the chroot to update libraries.
The update went mostly fine until it tried update the kernel, bootloader, and firmware files.
I saw some read-only filesystem errors for various things in /sys related to.firmware and CPU. I ignored them and uninstalled the kernel, bootloader, firmware, and mkinitcpio tools to avoid errors in the future.
When I shut down my laptop today, it never.came back qon.
My laptop doesn't POST any longer and no longer activates the keyboard backlight. Weird right?
Fans don't come on, no LEDs other than the charging LED come on. The laptop eventually just shuts itself off after a few minutes.
Tried automated BIOS recovery, no avail.
Guess I'm going to dump the eeprom and go from there.
So my question to you guys is, does the archlinuxarm Iimage make any modifications via sysfs to firmaare? Is that even possible?