DETAILED ACTION
Claims 1, 3-9, 12-16 and 19 are pending. Claims 1, 6, 13 and 19 have been amended. Claims 10 and 17 has been cancelled.
The present application, filed on or after March 16, 2013, is being examined under the first inventor to file provisions of the AIA .
This final office action is in response to the applicant’s response received on 12/04/2025, for the non-final office action mailed on 09/05/2025.
Examiner’s Notes
Examiner has cited particular columns and line numbers, paragraph numbers, or figures in the references as applied to the claims below for the convenience of the applicant. Although the specified citations are representative of the teachings in the art and are applied to the specific limitations within the individual claim, other passages and figures may apply as well. It is respectfully requested from the applicant, in preparing the responses, to fully consider the references in entirety as potentially teaching all or part of the claimed invention, as well as the context of the passage as taught by the prior art or disclosed by the examiner.
Response to Arguments
Applicant's arguments filed 08/11/2025 regarding rejection made to claims 1, and 3-5 under 35 U.S.C. § 103 have been fully considered but but they are not persuasive.
Applicant argues software manifest containing updatable flags, see applicant’s remarks pp. 10. Remarks are moot in view of new ground(s) rejection.
Applicant further argues pre-existing symbolic links in a read-only partition that remain unmodified during updates, see applicant’s remarks pp. 10-11. Examiner respectfully disagrees as Kauffman teaches the symbolic links being part of the squashfs image in the uRTFI which is a read-only layer, see Kauffman paragraph [0077] and paragraph [0079], showing the first partition having the squashfs and having a secondary directory during upgrade to populate syslinks and boot files required for a new universal RTFI without modifying the first partition which is used for rollback using the previous image.
Applicant's arguments filed 08/11/2025 regarding rejection made to claims 6-10, 12-17 and 19 under 35 U.S.C. § 103 have been fully considered but they are not persuasive.
Applicant argues Ladkani modified with Kauffman and Chen do not teach segregating an installation service update from other service updates, see applicant’s remarks pp. 15. However, Kauffman teaches segregating an installation service update, see Kauffman paragraph [0048], “The slice services 220a-n and/or the client system may break data into data blocks. Block services 215a-q and slice services 220a-n may maintain mappings between an address of the client system and the eventual physical location of the data block in respective storage media of the storage node 200”).
Applicant further argues storing pending jobs before shutting down, see applicant’s remarks pp. 15-17. Applicant’s remarks are moot in view of new ground(s) rejection. Furthermore, applicant argues points in which they are not claimed such as before shutting down and after restart.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 103
In the event the determination of the status of the application as subject to AIA 35 U.S.C. 102 and 103 (or as subject to pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 102 and 103) is incorrect, any correction of the statutory basis (i.e., changing from AIA to pre-AIA ) for the rejection will not be considered a new ground of rejection if the prior art relied upon, and the rationale supporting the rejection, would be the same under either status.
The following is a quotation of 35 U.S.C. 103 which forms the basis for all obviousness rejections set forth in this Office action:
A patent for a claimed invention may not be obtained, notwithstanding that the claimed invention is not identically disclosed as set forth in section 102, if the differences between the claimed invention and the prior art are such that the claimed invention as a whole would have been obvious before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to a person having ordinary skill in the art to which the claimed invention pertains. Patentability shall not be negated by the manner in which the invention was made.
Claim(s) 1 is rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Ladkani et al. (US-PGPUB-NO: 2021/0141626 A1) hereinafter Ladkani, in further view of Kauffman et al. (US-PGPUB-NO: 2022/0350584 A1) hereinafter Kauffman and Hartley et al. (US-PGPUB-NO: 2023/0176857 A1) hereinafter Hartley.
As per claim 1, Ladkani teaches a method of operating a baseboard management controller (BMC), comprising: receiving, at the BMC (see Ladkani paragraph [0057], showing the BMC), an update package (see Ladkani paragraph [0060], showing the BMC update package being received and stored into update partition) containing one or more updated software components of a firmware image of the BMC (see Ladkani paragraph [0064], showing a plurality of independently updateable partitions for existing service module (i.e., one or more update software components) and allowing independent updates of services); determining, based on a configuration (see Ladkani paragraph [0034], “The RW partitions 122-1, 122-2, 122-3, . . . , 122-N and service modules 124 may also apply to other aspects of the BMC 102 firmware. For example, the configuration data 116 of the BMC's 102 firmware may also advantageously be its own service module 124 within an RW partition 122-N, or may be divided into multiple service modules/RW partitions. For example, if a feature is disabled in the configuration data 116, the configuration data 116 can be updated itself without having to update the entire BMC 102 by providing the configuration data 116 as its own RW partition 122-N”, that a group of updated software components of the update package to replace a group of existing updatable software components in a read/write partition of the BMC (see Ladkani paragraph [0090], “According to one aspect of the present disclosure, a system comprises a BMC comprising a process and a memory. The memory may include a non-volatile memory and a volatile memory. The non-volatile memory may comprise firmware categorized into a plurality of independently updatable service modules, each of the independently updatable storage modules being stored on a read-write (RW) partition of the non-volatile memory”); and storing the group of updated software components in the read/write partition to replace the group of existing updatable software components (see Ladkani paragraph [0038], “The update agent may unmount the update partition 132 by, e.g., using its virtual memory service to unmount the update partition from the host computing device 160. The update agent 180 may then replace an existing service module in the corresponding RW partition 122-N of the non-volatile memory with the update service module included in the BMC update package”) wherein a read-only partition contains non-updatable components of the firmware image (see Ladkani paragraph [0016], “The root file system is stored in a read-only partition of the BMC's non-volatile memory (e.g., SPI flash drive). The root file system of the BMC includes a plurality of executable applications and their libraries”).
Ladkani does not explicitly teach, wherein the read/write partition stores the group of updated software components at a first directory path, wherein the read-only partition contains a respective symbolic link for each component of the group of updated software components at a secondary directory path, wherein the respective symbolic link is pre-existing in the read-only partition prior to receiving the update package and remains unmodified in the read-only partition during the storing of the group of updated software components, wherein the non-updatable components access each component of the group of updated software components via the respective symbolic link in the read-only partition at the secondary directory path, wherein when a loader of the BMC attempts to load a component from the second directory path in the read-only partition during boot, the loader detects that the component is the respective symbolic link pointing to a corresponding component at the first directory path in the read/write partition, and the loader loads the corresponding component from the first directory path in the read/write partition. However, Kauffman teaches wherein the read/write partition stores the group of updated software components at a first directory path (see Kauffman paragraph [0079], “In some embodiments the boot is the first partition on the disk and contains the kernel, the initramfs, the bootloader, the kernel symbol map, and a kernel microcode patch. These files may also be contained in the/boot directory inside the squashfs. The boot partition may also have a subdirectory for the currently active boot files and symbolic links that make it possible for the bootloader to operate without modification. On some compute nodes, boot also contains several ESX ISO images. These images will live in the currently active directory with symlinks provided as needed for use by the bootloader”), wherein the read-only partition contains a respective symbolic link for each component of the group of updated software components at a secondary directory path, wherein the respective symbolic link is pre-existing in the read-only partition prior to receiving the update package and remains unmodified in the read-only partition during the storing of the group of updated software components (see Kauffman paragraph [0077], “In some embodiments a uRTFI uses the squashfs image as the read-only layer 410 of an overlay file system, without extracting its contents. This simplifies the components of the RTFI process that are error prone (e.g., backup, imaging, and rollback)”) and paragraph [0079], “In some embodiments the boot is the first partition on the disk and contains the kernel, the initramfs, the bootloader, the kernel symbol map, and a kernel microcode patch. These files may also be contained in the/boot directory inside the squashfs. The boot partition may also have a subdirectory for the currently active boot files and symbolic links that make it possible for the bootloader to operate without modification. On some compute nodes, boot also contains several ESX ISO images. These images will live in the currently active directory with symlinks provided as needed for use by the bootloader”), wherein the non-updatable components access each component of the group of updated software components via the respective symbolic link in the read-only partition at the secondary directory path (see Kauffman paragraph [0080], “During an upgrade, a secondary directory is created and populated with the boot files and symlinks required to boot to a new universal RTFI kernel. A staging operation sets this secondary directory as the new current active image and the old current as the previous image. A soft reboot (i.e., kexec) is performed and the initramfs' init script mount the new image as the active overlay and then call the sfrtfi script to complete configuration updates in the new image. If a rollback is required, the previous image is booted as the new current image and the secondary directory is cleaned up. On a successful upgrade the previous image directory (re: the old image) is cleaned up during the post-install phase”), wherein when a loader of the BMC attempts to load a component from the second directory path in the read-only partition during boot, the loader detects that the component is the respective symbolic link pointing to a corresponding component at the first directory path in the read/write partition, and the loader loads the corresponding component from the first directory path in the read/write partition (see Kauffman paragraph [0093], “At block 630 the filesystems created at block 626 are mounted and at block 632 one or more files are copied to the filesystems. At block 634 one or more overlays are set up, and at block 636 a file system is mounted in the one or more overlays. At block 638 the root director is changed to point to the image 640. At block 650 a cleanup operation is implemented, which may include setting up a bootloader initramfms at block 652 and appending a custom initialization and config file at block 654”).
Ladkani and Kauffman are analogous art because they are in the same field of endeavor of software development. Therefore, it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skills in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to modify Ladkani’s teaching of firmware update for a baseboard management controller with Kauffman’s teaching of a universal return to factory image process to incorporate combining a read-only and a read-write layer into an overlay system in order to make it safer to return an update back to factory image if an issue occurs while updating/upgrading.
Ladkani modified with Kauffman do not explicitly teach firmware installation service configured with a software manifest, wherein the software manifest comprises an updatable flag indicating whether each software component is updatable or non-updatable. However, Hartley teaches firmware installation service configured with a software manifest, wherein the software manifest comprises an updatable flag indicating whether each software component is updatable or non-updatable (see Hartley paragraph [0020], “Prior to beginning the copying of the upgraded components, an upgrade flag is set. The IoT device then begins copying the received components into memory, replaces the manifest with the updated manifest, and clears the upgrade flag. If the IoT device is power cycled before the upgrade process is complete, the upgrade flag will not have been cleared, and so will be detected when the IoT device reboots, allowing the IoT device to resume the upgrade process rather than attempting to execute the (partially upgraded) embedded software”).
Ladkani, Kauffman and Hartley are analogous art because they are in the same field of endeavor of software development. Therefore, it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skills in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to modify Ladkani’s teaching of firmware update for a baseboard management controller and Kauffman’s teaching of a universal return to factory image process with Hartley’s teaching of safe modular upgrades of software and firmware to incorporate an upgrade flag in a software manifest to make sure files that needs upgraded is upgraded and files that don’t need to be upgraded aren’t upgraded.
Claim(s) 3 and 4 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Ladkani (US-PGPUB-NO: 2021/0141626 A1), Kauffman (US-PGPUB-NO: 2022/0350584 A1) and Hartley (US-PGPUB-NO: 2023/0176857 A1), in further view of Wille et al. (US-PGPUB-NO: 2024/0168727 A1) hereinafter Wille.
As per claim 3, Ladkani modified with Kauffman and Hatley do not explicitly teach further comprising: determining that a first subset of the group of updated software components corresponds to the group of existing upgradable software components in the read/write partition, wherein the storing the group of updated software components includes: replacing the group of existing upgradable software components with the first subset of the group of updated software components. However, Wille teaches further comprising: determining that a first subset of the group of updated software components corresponds to the group of existing upgradable software components in the read/write partition (see Wille paragraph [0155], showing the new version (i.e., update software components) available for the software components), wherein the storing the group of updated software components includes: replacing the group of existing upgradable software components with the first subset of the group of updated software components (see Wille paragraph [0161], showing the replacement of software component by a different software component based on a new version of the software component).
Ladkani, Kaufman, Hartley and Wille are analogous art because they are in the same field of endeavor of software development. Therefore, it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skills in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to modify Ladkani’s teaching of firmware update for a baseboard management controller, Kauffman’s teaching of a universal return to factory image process and Hartley’s teaching of safe modular upgrades of software and firmware with Wille’s teaching of creating/updating software application and enabling a computer system to perform the creation and updating to incorporate replacing existing software components with updated software components in order to keep software applications up-to-date which could improve security, performance or add features to a software application.
As per claim 4, Ladkani modified with Kauffman, Hartley and Wille teaches further comprising: determining that a second subset of the group of updated software components do not correspond to the group of existing upgradable software components in the read/write partition (see Wille paragraph [0153], showing the creation of software application), wherein the storing the group of updated software components includes: writing the second subset of the group of updated software components in the read/write partition (see Ladkani paragraph [0038], showing the BMC storing the update package in volatile memory); creating a respective symbolic link pointing to each software component of the second subset in the read-only partition (see Shea paragraph [0057], “At block 502, the processing device may identify a data object (e.g., symbolic link file) to be stored in a file system. The data object includes a symbolic link as a path, and the symbolic link points to a target path”).
Claim(s) 5 is rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Ladkani (US-PGPUB-NO: 2021/0141626 A1), Kauffman (US-PGPUB-NO: 2022/0350584 A1) and Hartley (US-PGPUB-NO: 2023/0176857 A1), in further view of Dasari et al. (US-PGPUB-NO: 2016/0335005 A1) hereinafter Dasari.
As per claim 5, Ladkani modified with Kauffman and Harley do not explicitly teach further comprising: during starting up of the BMC, obtaining, from the read-only partition, a first symbolic link pointing to a first component of the firmware image stored in the read/write partition; locating the first component in the read/write partition according to the first symbolic link; and loading the first component from the read/write partition into a memory of the BMC. However, Dasari teaches further comprising: during starting up of the BMC, obtaining, from the read-only partition, a first symbolic link pointing to a first component of the firmware image stored in the read/write partition (see Dasari paragraph [0046], showing prior to system boot setting up an interrupt and creating an SMI handler to configure the pointer to the update data); locating the first component in the read/write partition according to the first symbolic link (see Dasari paragraph [0046], showing the validation of the update data that it is pointed to prior to the update data transfer); and loading the first component from the read/write partition into a memory of the BMC (see Dasari [0046], showing the data transfer (i.e., loading) after validation of the update data).
Ladkani, Kauffman, Hartley and Dasari are analogous art because they are in the same field of endeavor of software development. Therefore, it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skills in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to modify Ladkani’s teaching of firmware update for a baseboard management controller, Kauffman’s teaching of a universal return to factory image process and Hartley’s teaching of safe modular upgrades of software and firmware with Dasari’s teaching of performing operations on memory of a computing device, storing update data on a first memory of a computing device to incorporate using a pointer to link memory address of where the update image is located in order to scale out read processing and increasing speed performance.
Claim(s) 6-19 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Ladkani et al. (US-PGPUB-NO: 2021/0141626 A1) hereinafter Ladkani in further view of Kauffman et al. (US-PGPUB-NO: 2022/0350584 A1) hereinafter Kauffman, Ballard et al. (US-PGPUB-NO: 2020/0034541 A1) and Chen et al. (US-PGPUB-NO: 2023/0367574 A1) hereinafter Chen.
As per claim 6, Ladkani teaches a method of operating a baseboard management controller (BMC), comprising: receiving, at the BMC, an update package containing one or more updated software components of a firmware image of the BMC (see Ladkani paragraph [0057], showing the BMC receiving an update package); determining, by the existing installation service component, that the one or more updated software components include an update installation service component (see Ladkani paragraph [0018], showing updatable service modules) and a first group of updated software components that are service components (see Ladkani paragraph [0034], showing the firmware being applied based on configuration data); storing the first layer in a read/write partition of the BMC (see Ladkani paragraph [0038], “The update agent may unmount the update partition 132 by, e.g., using its virtual memory service to unmount the update partition from the host computing device 160. The update agent 180 may then replace an existing service module in the corresponding RW partition 122-N of the non-volatile memory with the update service module included in the BMC update package”).
Ladkani does not explicitly teach in response to determining that the one or more updated software components include the update installation service component: segregating, by the existing installation service component, the updated installation service component from updates to the first group of updated service components; creating, by the existing installation service component, a second layer on top of existing layers in an overlay file system, the second layer containing the updated installations service components; shutting down the existing installation service component; starting the updated installation service component from the second layer; and merging the first layer, the second layer and the existing layers into an overlay layer that includes the first group of updated software components and the updated installation service component. However, Kauffman teaches in response to determining that the one or more updated software components include the update installation service component: segregating, by the existing installation service component, the updated installation service component from updates to the first group of updated service components (see Kauffman paragraph [0048], “The slice services 220a-n and/or the client system may break data into data blocks. Block services 215a-q and slice services 220a-n may maintain mappings between an address of the client system and the eventual physical location of the data block in respective storage media of the storage node 200”); creating, by the existing installation service component, a second layer on top of existing layers in an overlay file system, the second layer containing the updated installations service components (see Kauffman paragraph [0081], “In some embodiments, the root partition contains the entire runtime and all applications. This is a copy of the squashfs created by the build system extracted to disk. After the transition to a uRTFI the root partition will appear as the presentation layer of the overlayfs, with the squashfs mounted as the lower layer and bind mounts of real partitions in the presentation layer as needed to support iRTFI operations. A control file may be used to manage iRTFI operations and will consist of a list of key/value pairs that control what the initramfs (e.g., via its embedded init script) does. This includes which boot files and squashfs to use and processing required by RTFI operations such as downgrading to a pre-universal RTFI release”); shutting down the existing installation service component (see Kauffman paragraph [0100], “At block 858 the mode is set to uRFTI.At operation 860 a systemd shutdown is implemented”); starting the updated installation service component from the second layer (see Kauffman paragraph [0100], “If, at block 862 the update is a uRFTI then at operation 864 a kexec is implemented”) merging the first layer, the second layer and the existing layers into an overlay layer that includes the first group of updated software components and the updated installation service component (see Hauffman paragraph [0025], “In some embodiments, a method performed by one or more processing resources of one or more computer systems comprises implementing, in a storage node, a multi-tiered file system comprising a read-only layer that contains a base configuration for the storage node and a read-write layer that contains modifications to the base configuration; and combining the read-only layer and the read-write layer into an overlay file system to be presented to an operating system”).
Ladkani and Hauffman are analogous art because they are in the same field of endeavor of software development. Therefore, it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skills in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to modify Ladkani’s teaching of firmware update for a baseboard management controller with Kauffman’s teaching of a universal return to factory image process to incorporate combining a read-only and a read-write layer into an overlay system in order to make it safer to return an update back to factory image if an issue occurs while updating/upgrading.
Ladkani modified with Kauffman do not explicitly teach storing, by the existing installation service component, the updates to the first group of update software components as pending jobs in a non-volatile storage of the BMC and locating, by the updated installation service component, the pending jobs stored in the non-volatile storage. However, Ballard teaches storing, by the existing installation service component, the updates to the first group of update software components as pending jobs in a non-volatile storage of the BMC (see Ballard paragraph [0028], “In the case where an information handling system is placed into a suspend state, such as a suspend-to-RAM (S3) or suspend-to-disk (S4) state, the information handling system may or may not be configured to provide a full power reset on. Here, it may be desirable to provide an indication that the reason for a full power reset is due to the entry to the suspend state, and to therefore maintain device 200 in the lockdown mode. Here, suspend state attribute 234 operates to identify that a particular full power reset is due to a suspend state, and thus device 200 can be maintained in the lockdown mode in spite of the fact that the device experienced a full power reset”) and locating, by the updated installation service component, the pending jobs stored in the non-volatile storage (see Ballard paragraph [0028], “In an alternative embodiment, when a BIOS associated with the information handling system detects a resume from a suspend state, the BIOS can provide a command to enable lockdown mode attribute 232 prior to handing control back to the OS. In another embodiment, because a BMC of the information handling system is deemed a secure channel to device 200, a command received on BMC interface 240 operates to set the device into the unlocked mode”).
Ladkani, Kauffman and Ballard are analogous art because they are in the same field of endeavor of software development. Therefore, it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skills in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to modify Ladkani’s teaching of firmware update for a baseboard management controller and Kauffman’s teaching of a universal return to factory image process with Ballard’s teaching of securing add-in cards from firmware and configuration changes to incorporate saving a suspend state when updating or making changes to make sure information still runs smoothly after updating.
Ladkani modified with Kauffman and Ballard do not explicitly teach creating, by the updated installation service component, a first layer on top the second layer in the overlay file system, wherein the first layer contains the first group of updated software components, wherein the existing layers contain existing software components corresponding to the first group of updated software components and wherein the first group of updated software components replaces the corresponding existing software components in the existing layers and the updated installation service component replaces the existing installation service component. However, Chen teaches creating, by the updated installation service component, a first layer on top of the second layer in the overlay file system, wherein the first layer contains the first group of updated software components (see Chen paragraph [0043], showing build generator creating different layers (i.e., application layer, kernel layer and system layer), wherein the existing layers contain existing software components corresponding to the first group of updated software components (see Chen paragraph [0046], showing the updated images with different layers being sent) and wherein the first group of updated software components replaces the corresponding existing software components in the existing layers and the updated installation service component replaces the existing installation service component (see Chen paragraph [0047], “Administrators can generate a customized image file after sending an edited configuration file to the bundle builder 120. The image file may be customized in the layer generator 214 through files obtained from the file collector 212 in accordance with the edited configuration file, which are allocated to different layers and packages. The different layers and packages can be subsequently generated and used to replace different layers in the original image based on the Linux standardized packing procedure in this example”).
Ladkani, Kauffman, Ballard and Chen are analogous art because they are in the same field of endeavor of software development. Therefore, it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skills in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to modify Ladkani’s teaching of firmware update for a baseboard management controller, Kauffman’s teaching of a universal return to factory image process and Ballard’s teaching of securing add-in cards from firmware and configuration changes with Chen’s teaching of operating system images with a decoupled architecture to incorporate using different layers combined into an image package to simplify software updates.
As per claim 7, Ladkani modified with Kaffman, Ballard and Chen teaches wherein a bottom layer of the overlay file system contains a kernel of the BMC (see Chen FIG. 4, showing the kernel layer at the bottom).
As per claim 8, Ladkani modified with Kaffman, Ballard and Chen teaches wherein the bottom layer is stored in a read-only partition (see Ladkani paragraph [0016], showing root system files (i.e., non-updatable) being stored in read-only memory).
As per claim 9, Ladkani modified with Kauffman, Ballard and Chen teaches further comprising: determining that a second group of updated software components of the one or more updated software components are core components of the BMC and include the kernel (see Ladkani paragraph [0025], “The BMC 102 comprises a processor 104, non-volatile memory 110, volatile memory 130, and update agent 180. The processor 104 controls the operations of the BMC 102. The processor 104 may execute firmware, such as boot loader 112, kernel 114, configuration 116 and root file system 120, or other code stored in the BMC 102. The processor 104 may also execute the update agent 180 for updating the firmware of the BMC. The update agent 180 may be machine readable code stored on the BMC's memory, such as the nonvolatile memory 110 and/or the volatile memory 130, for performing an update of the firmware of the BMC 102”); and flashing the bottom layer with the second group of updated software components (see Chen paragraph [0038], “In a system as defined above, a software composer only needs to replace or update the software component implementing the data type “currency”, and all other changes are automatically taken care of by the system. Thus, a lean and tightly-tailored, yet easy to maintain software application may be created, saving development time, software storage space, computational overhead, et cetera. Furthermore, creating a software application using this system reduces risk and regression errors”).
As per claim 12, Ladkani modified with Hauffman, Ballard and Chen teaches further comprising: during starting up of the BMC, providing the overlay layer combing all layers of the overlay file system (see Hauffman paragraph [0076], “The overlay layer 440 (also referred to the presentation layer) is the layer that the system uses and represents the top of the root filesystem”); locating the first group of updated software components on the merged layer (see Hauffman paragraph [0075], “while the read-write layer 420 contains modifications to the read only layer, for example network configuration changes”); and loading the first group of updated software components from the merged layer into a memory of the BMC (see Hauffman paragraph [0080], “During an upgrade, a secondary directory is created and populated with the boot files and symlinks required to boot to a new universal RTFI kernel. A staging operation sets this secondary directory as the new current active image and the old current as the previous image. A soft reboot (i.e., kexec) is performed and the initramfs' init script mount the new image as the active overlay and then call the sfrtfi script to complete configuration updates in the new image. If a rollback is required, the previous image is booted as the new current image and the secondary directory is cleaned up. On a successful upgrade the previous image directory (re: the old image) is cleaned up during the post-install phase.”).
As per claims 13-16 and 19, these are the apparatus claims to method claims 6-9 and 12. Therefore, they are rejected for the same reasons as above.
Conclusion
The prior art made of record and not relied upon is considered pertinent to applicant's disclosure.
Tung (US-PGPUB-NO: 2018/0173516 A1) teaches remotely updating firmware.
Madhavarapu et al. (US-PAT-NO: 9,507,843 B1) teaches efficient replication of distributed storage change for read-only nodes of distributed database.
Ranaweera et al. (US-PAT-NO: 7, 484, 084 B1) teaches use of baseboard management controller to facilitate installation of firmware in a processing system.
Shea et al. (US-PGPUB-NO: 2020/0073957 A1) teaches preserving symbolic links and paths in a file system using an intermediate file system structure.
Applicant's amendment necessitated the new ground(s) of rejection presented in this Office action. Accordingly, THIS ACTION IS MADE FINAL. See MPEP § 706.07(a). Applicant is reminded of the extension of time policy as set forth in 37 CFR 1.136(a).
A shortened statutory period for reply to this final action is set to expire THREE MONTHS from the mailing date of this action. In the event a first reply is filed within TWO MONTHS of the mailing date of this final action and the advisory action is not mailed until after the end of the THREE-MONTH shortened statutory period, then the shortened statutory period will expire on the date the advisory action is mailed, and any nonprovisional extension fee (37 CFR 1.17(a)) pursuant to 37 CFR 1.136(a) will be calculated from the mailing date of the advisory action. In no event, however, will the statutory period for reply expire later than SIX MONTHS from the mailing date of this final action.
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/LENIN PAULINO/Examiner, Art Unit 2197 /BRADLEY A TEETS/Supervisory Patent Examiner, Art Unit 2197