I honestly have no idea what the "sync" command does. The way I understand it (amounts to what the wiki told me) it saves the changes after you've ran "flasher --local -f -k [kernel image]".

I suspect the "softupd -s --local" also has something to do with it, but I don't know what exactly it does... Unless it just prints what's going on to stdout...

Anyway, I have no idea how it works or what it works with. You just run "sync" with no options according to the instructions I followed. It's possible the first "flasher" command doesn't actually permanently flash it, or there's some watchdog that will reset it if the sync command isn't ran... *Shrug* Out of my area of expertise.