Intel To Drop Very Old Drivers/BIOS From Their Site, But The Linux Impact To Be Minimal

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Intel To Drop Very Old Drivers/BIOS From Their Site, But The Linux Impact To Be Minimal

Making waves today is that Intel will be removing very old BIOS and driver downloads from their site on or after 22 November. Though these software downloads for the products in question are around ~20 years old so the real-world impact should be small plus with Linux drivers being in the mainline kernel, all you'd really be losing out on are BIOS updates that themselves haven't seen updates in years...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Intel-Dropping-Old-Drivers-Site

[milkylainen]

How hard can it be to stick them in a low maintenance open dirwalk http or ftp, indexed by product?
Everybody just loves to overly complicate stuff. It's not like it's rocket-science to maintain a bunch of files for availability on the internet now is it?

[kpedersen]

There is the one on thinkpads.com (i.e for the T30):

https://thinkpads.com/support/Thinkp.../ddfm/T30.html

and https://archive.org/details/IBMLenovoIntelOldDrivers

Obviously directed towards Thinkpad owners but the Intel drivers are pretty generic and should work with things like HP etc.

Though like most proprietary things, the (code) quality is pretty poor and there is very much a lack of maintenance. Old version of OpenGL spec for example.

[Pander]

Hopefully, they can find a place at https://fwupd.org/

[enigmaxg2]

"Intel is said to be removing old drivers and BIOS from their original Pentium era product offerings later in the week. Intel hasn't provided an exact list of all the products affected, but they are all close to 20 years old and beyond."

WRONG

They are phasing out products newer than that (2012 era at least), including Core 2nd and 3rd gen motherboards (example: DH61AGL), Wifi and bluetooth cards (example: Centrino Wireless-N 2230)

So unless we're in 2032...these products aren't even a decade old...

[starshipeleven]

Hopefully, they can find a place at https://fwupd.org/

fwupd does not work with BIOS firmware. It relies on "UEFI capsule" functionality.

[Pander]

There is a difference between fwupd and the what is offered on the website.

[starshipeleven]

How hard can it be to stick them in a low maintenance open dirwalk http or ftp, indexed by product?
Everybody just loves to overly complicate stuff. It's not like it's rocket-science to maintain a bunch of files for availability on the internet now is it?

It's called planned obsolescence. Updating old BIOS to latest can still be useful to fix issues that old boards have.

[starshipeleven]

There is a difference between fwupd and the what is offered on the website.

Not sure I understand. the fwupd website is listing what is in fwupd repo and that's all stuff that relies on "UEFI capsule" to work, even if it is not a UEFI update for a PC.

[starshipeleven]

Somebody make a backup of those files just in case.

Do something yourself, or shut up. We have already enough thoughts and prayers in this world.