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Quotes of the week (Linus special)Quotes of the week (Linus special)Posted Oct 15, 2009 8:12 UTC (Thu) by roblucid (subscriber, #48964)In reply to: Quotes of the week (Linus special) by thedevil Parent article: Quotes of the week (Linus special)
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.
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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)
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