No, it's not a linux thing :)

The upgrader sends a gzipped partition image to the player, which "pumps" the hard drive (the pump program in the empeg's ramdisk decompresses this directly onto the partition).

I got the term "pump" from the old Acorn R140 unix workstation (ARM2 based, 1988) where in the case of a bad system failure (eg: a clueless unix newbie (blush!) got the arguments wrong on a piped tar and wiped out most of his filesystem), the service engineer just hooked up a good workstation, booted the dead one from a magic floppy, and the entire hard disk image was pumped over the ethernet to the dead one.

Hugo