Yes, in theory it could use the flash. However, there are at least 3 different types of flash in use on receivers, all with different block layouts - some with parameter blocks, some without, etc.

The design was originally going to use an OTP rom. This didn't happen, and as we'd designed it to never need to write to the flash, they just picked any old flash chips - Intel, Micron, SST...

The Rio does send a WOL packet *coming out of suspend* - *not* on cold boots. Obviously, to be suspended it needed to have booted software from somewhere, hence it knows where to send the WOL packet to.

There are two WOL packet types, that we send. The first is (I believe) the standard WOL, which is a broadcast containing a byte sequence which can be easily detected by the mostly-asleep ethernet chipset - 6 bytes of 0xFF followed by the MAC address to wake repeated 16 times.

The second is just a single UDP packet addressed to the last server; this will either go direct or generate an ARP request, either of which will wake a PNA card (which doesn't need the WOL mumbo jumbo).

There are plenty of people who use WOL with the receiver, meaning it really does send addressed WOL packets. Either that or the server PCs are just waking up by magic...

Hugo