#1227 Firmware images format support

[quanta]

Modern firmware images are organized into modules, similar to executables for various operating systems. In fact, such organizations can be found as early as motherboard BIOS (eg: LHA archives in AwardBIOS firmware). Such organizations make them viable targets for 7-Zip to add support to. Firmware file systems can be found not just in proprietary hardware, but also used in third party firmware projects such as DD-WRT and Coreboot. Information for some proprietary BIOS formats can be found in bios_extract[1]. In the case of AwardBIOS firmware, it also store image files, which can be viewed and extracted by Award BIOS Editor[2].

[1] http://www.coreboot.org/Bios_extract
[2] http://awdbedit.sourceforge.net/