The EEPROM does not contain the actual firmware, but it's configuration (or configuration of hardware itself in case of simple designs). Essentially any Fast Et

The EEPROM does not contain the actual firmware, but it's configuration (or configuration of hardware itself in case of simple designs). Essentially any Fast Ethernet and newer NIC has some configuration EEPROM that is accessible by ethtool (which is what the tool is for after all). Common use cases for ethtool are persistently changing MAC address and fixing broken hardware (either to work around pre-existing HW bugs or to fix it after this EEPROM got somehow erased). Generally the EEPROM does not contain anything like executable code, although it probably can contain patches for microcode on many NICs.