Weekly Edition
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Quotes of the week (Linus special)
That driver is _not_ "just a driver". It's something
more. Something dank and smelly, that has grown in dark and
forbidding places.
-- Linus Torvalds
Again, you're living in that dream world. Wake up, sheeple.
-- Linus Torvalds
BIOS writers write crap, because it's a crap job. It's that simple. Yes, they're probably drunk or drugged up, but they need it to deal with the hand they have been dealt.... So stop blaming the BIOS. We _know_ firmware is crap - there is no point in blaming it. The response to "firmware bug" should be "oh, of course - and our code was too fragile, since it didn't take that into account". And stop saying these problems would magically go away with open-source firmware. That just shows that you don't understand the realities of the situation. Even an open-source bios would end up having buggy tables, and even with an opensource bios, users generally wouldn't upgrade it.
Any time people do ad-hoc locking with "clever" schemes, it's
almost invariably buggy. So the rule is: just don't do that.
-- Linus Torvalds(Log in to post comments)
Quotes of the week (Linus special) Posted Oct 15, 2009 4:08 UTC (Thu) by thedevil (subscriber, #32913) [Link]
The second quote made me curious about the process of upgrading my BIOS. I pulled out the manual for my mobo (ASUS P5GC-MX) and learned there are 4 different ways. Of these 3 require DOS and a floppy (!) and the 4th requires Windows. Maybe I would be willing to download FreeDOS, but the computer was born without a floppy drive (I think most are, nowadays). So, I don't think I deserve any coal lumps for not doing it.
Quotes of the week (Linus special) Posted Oct 15, 2009 4:17 UTC (Thu) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
you can download a freedos ISO image that you can boot from.
Using FreeDOS to flash BIOS Posted Oct 15, 2009 11:01 UTC (Thu) by tajyrink (subscriber, #2750) [Link]
And I think the guide to doing that is far too hidden, even though it's dead simple in the end.
In GRUB:
(just /boot/dos subdirectory on your hard disk)
where memdisk is /usr/lib/syslinux/memdisk from syslinux package in a few distros and somewhere similar in others, and imagefile.img is eg. the single disk FreeDOS linked to from http://www.freedos.org/freedos/files/
You can mount the .img with mount -o loop /boot/dos/myimage.img /mnt, copy the flasher .exe + new BIOS there, then unmount and boot the computer to DosFlashDisk from GRUB menu.
Nowadays I should learn GRUB2, though...
On bios updates Posted Oct 15, 2009 7:14 UTC (Thu) by wt (guest, #11793) [Link]
On some machines, it may be possible to use the flashrom tool from the Coreboot project to flash a vendor BIOS. However, it is obviously somewhat dangerous if the vendor doesn't support that method.
wt
Quotes of the week (Linus special) Posted Oct 15, 2009 8:12 UTC (Thu) by roblucid (subscriber, #48964) [Link]
BIOS Upgrades with consumer oriented companies like Dell become worse; because they started bundling the BIOS update with a program called Winflash (IIRC) to try and flash under Vista.
This seems far riskier to me, compared to the reboot simple with DOS and minimum driver method, but it was the supported method. The "Mandatory" upgrade, screwed Linux up, so I got involved with support to make a downgrade back to the original BIOS which had Linux certification. During this re-flash under Vista some glitch occured freezing the flash process and leaving blank firmware and the Winflash program would not try to flash again. An attempt to restart WinFlash and burn the image, caused a Vista Pop Up accusing me of piracy, due to some license keys being missing, and promptly Shutdown the machine "as a customer service to help me avoid using unauthorised software". Not what you want when there's no boot code. Inspection of the Mobo, showed the Firmware was soldered on not socketed; and therefore seemed bricked. The On Site warranty meant they sent an engineer, who fitted an entire replacement Mobo.
Now if I'd used a Bios extractor tool, to debundle it from WinFlash; or the Linux BIOS Dell had developed for use with their under Linux upgrade tools, probably it would have ended up expensive for me. As it was, using the official (but stupid) method meant they had to pick up the pieces.
Quotes of the week (Linus special) Posted Oct 15, 2009 11:34 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
What a horror story.
*This* sort of thing is why flash is worse than loadable firmware. Of course it's hard to do loadable firmware with something needed at boot :/
Quotes of the week (Linus special) Posted Oct 16, 2009 0:20 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link] Memory bus BIOS should be so small and simple you never want to update it. It should be just enough to allow the system to access a removable USB volume for the rest of what BIOS currently does. For booting, the immutable BIOS need only know how to boot from that USB volume. Lots of standard software could be used to update that USB volume, and if disaster should occur, worst case you just replace it with a backup device, or something you made via download, or borrowed from a friend, ordered through the mail, or whatever.
Quotes of the week (Linus special) Posted Oct 16, 2009 12:05 UTC (Fri) by madhatter (subscriber, #4665) [Link]
ouch.
i note in passing that the openmoko GTA02 sidestepped the problem neatly by having *two* boot loaders. one is fully-writeable, gets upgraded from time to time, and this is the one that normally boots from cold to start the OS; the other is read-only but can be used to reflash either the OS or the writeable boot loader.
very hard to brick, that device.
Quotes of the week (Linus special) Posted Oct 16, 2009 16:55 UTC (Fri) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]
Very hard to brick unless you let the battery run down!
(admittedly, that's now fixed)
Quotes of the week (Linus special) Posted Oct 15, 2009 9:05 UTC (Thu) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]
One thing I like about Gigabyte mobos is that updating the bios is just dumping a bios image on a usb key and pointing the current bios to it. No winfoo, no floppies, no isos
Quotes of the week (Linus special) Posted Oct 15, 2009 11:33 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
More recent asus motherboards (e.g. the P6T) allow you to just dump a BIOS image on a FAT-formatted USB key, stick the key in a USB socket, and hold the right key at startup. (Mind you I haven't actually tried this yet so I don't know if it works, but that's what it says on the tin.)
Quotes of the week (Linus special) Posted Oct 15, 2009 12:41 UTC (Thu) by bpetkov (subscriber, #51109) [Link]
Yep, it works. I've done it couple of times on my M3A78-PRO. IIRC, it even dumps your old BIOS image as a backup.
Quotes of the week (Linus special) Posted Oct 16, 2009 15:34 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Compare to my server-class Tyan motherboard. There are huge problems with IPMI on this system (basically it doesn't work at all), but in order to flash the BIOS to possibly fix it, I need
1) a floppy drive (on a modern server?! WTF?)
If the flashing fails (and googling suggests that this is not uncommon, not surprising given the info above), your BIOS is toast and you have to send it back to be replaced, only Tyan say they refuse to accept replacement requests from customers and you must go through your OEM. i.e., if your machine is out of warranty, or if it's *in* warranty and your OEM aren't nice guys, you're dead and your umpty-thousand-quid server is toast.
Oddly I have decided to live with whatever BIOS flaws this system may have. I can live without IPMI.
Quotes of the week (Linus special) Posted Oct 16, 2009 16:16 UTC (Fri) by bpetkov (subscriber, #51109) [Link]
Yeah, it can get even worse: in my case, the BIOS update was supposed to fix a problem - which it didn't. Instead, it broke suspend-to-ram and I couldn't replay the old BIOS because the stupid version check said that you cannot update to an older version. Dumb idiots - David is as every bit as right when saying that BIOS programmers smoke crack!
And it can get even more worse: you don't get a BIOS update because the "product has reached end of life... " and all you dumb board buyers should shove it.
Yours is yet another of the gazillion BIOS nightmares people post all over the net. Maybe we should put all those stories along with dmidecode info et al for proper identification on wiki.kernel.org, for people who want to buy a board. The problem with a b0rked BIOS is that you don't always notice it right after you buy the board but after some time of using it and maybe then it is too late to return it.
Hmm...
Quotes of the week (Linus special) Posted Oct 16, 2009 20:06 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
It's not *that* bad. The reason why I'm willing to go without BIOS updates
is that other than IPMI the BIOS basically works: even the DMAR tables are OK (unlike Asus which has as far as I can tell never shipped a BIOS with working DMAR tables in its entire history).
Quotes of the week (Linus special) Posted Oct 16, 2009 22:06 UTC (Fri) by Tet (subscriber, #5433) [Link] I need 1) a floppy drive (on a modern server?! WTF?)Nope. mkisofs will turn a floppy image into a bootable CD-ROM. That's how I did my last BIOS upgrade. Quite why the vendors still distribute floppy based upgrades rather than ISO9660 images is beyond me. But it's not the end of the world.
Quotes of the week (Linus special) Posted Oct 16, 2009 22:13 UTC (Fri) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
http://www.freedos.org/freedos/files/ has the iso images (in fact you would have to hunt down the floppy image)
Quotes of the week (Linus special) Posted Oct 16, 2009 23:08 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Aha. Thanks for this: I've never done the bootable-CD dance (I prefer PXE
booting in recovery situations).
I'll have a look at that, if I get the gumption to risk my system by doing
Quotes of the week (Linus special) Posted Oct 16, 2009 23:11 UTC (Fri) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]
An alternative is memdisk - drop it into /boot, add it as a kernel entry in grub with initrd pointing to the floppy image to want, reboot.
Dell have support for updating their BIOSes via Linux. There's an app that copies it into a pre-allocated chunk of RAM, and then on reboot the firmware performs the flash itself.
Quotes of the week (Linus special) Posted Oct 15, 2009 13:39 UTC (Thu) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]
While we're having a Linus special, I quite liked (in reply to Alan Cox):
> - It'll no doubt make you feel less grumpy ;)
Not likely. Grumpy is my baseline.
Quotes of the week (Linus special) Posted Oct 15, 2009 22:01 UTC (Thu) by Tomasu (subscriber, #39889) [Link]
Yeah, I sent it up to lwn, but Jon said there was already so many good ones that he put that one on hold.
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