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Quotes of the week (Linus special)Quotes of the week (Linus special)Posted Oct 15, 2009 12:41 UTC (Thu) by bpetkov (subscriber, #51109)In reply to: Quotes of the week (Linus special) by nix Parent article: Quotes of the week (Linus special)
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.
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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.
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