AMI Is The Latest Vendor Joining The Linux Vendor Firmware Service

[phoronix]

Phoronix: AMI Is The Latest Vendor Joining The Linux Vendor Firmware Service

The Linux Vendor Firmware Service has scored a major win in the trek of easily updating of BIOS/firmware images from Linux... BIOS/firmware vendor AMI has joined the LVFS!..

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=AMI-Joins-LVFS

[brrrrttttt]

Well I never...

[tomtomme]

Asus EzFlash is more handy than updating bios from OS. It is OS independent. You get latest bios via Ethernet or a small Fat32 partition where you download manually the latest bios.

Asrock shares the same tech. Its nice yes. But I wonder how secure the code is...

[michaelb1]

Lets ignore these measly handouts and go open source in a real way! coreboot/libreboot open source BIOSes (with SeaBIOS payload) , and flashrom open-source flashing tool

[uid313]

Here is the vendor list.
Maybe coreboot can join?

Asus EzFlash is more handy than updating bios from OS. It is OS independent. You get latest bios via Ethernet or a small Fat32 partition where you download manually the latest bios.

Then you have to enter into Asus EzFlash at startup an then check. With LVFS updates can be delivered by update manager tool in the OS along with OS updates.
It can be installed by GNOME Software. So then it gets updated just like anything else.

[treba]

It’s the one quite a few people have been waiting for.

Who would that be?

[treba]

Gnome software is buggy as hell and then you have unbootable system with a corrupted bios. It is idiotic to trust gnome developers when updating your bios. Your gnome Linux can hang, crash etc during flashing.

Gnome software just acts as a frontend for fwupd. And they in turn have been working pretty hard to make sure they don't corrupt the bios. So I'd personally trust it more than Asus EzFlash

[Ardje]

Gnome software is buggy as hell and then you have unbootable system with a corrupted bios. It is idiotic to trust gnome developers when updating your bios. Your gnome Linux can hang, crash etc during flashing.

Of course you hate gnome. But that has nothing to do with flashing BIOS. That's just a UI.
My gigabyte wanted to update using ms-dos... But it wouldn't using pxe, it wouldn't using usb flash and it wouldn't using any other way, since the floppy drives were already broken.
The only thing I could do was use the coreboot flash utilities, edit the firmware by hand (bvi) to fix the mac address of my nic and flash it.
The same for my steam machine...
I don't know how I was supposed to flash the bios of it. So I patched my kernel with some kind of vendor interfacing so I could use the flash utilities of the bios vendor, as zotac had no clue about how to flash the bios on their steam machine from within steamos.

So yes, flashing bios from linux is more trust worthy than from legacy operating systems that don't have drivers. And don't forget: downtime is usually not allowed for some systems and in many cases you don't have hands on the device... So inserting something that boots some kind of software that can run some kind of flashing software... No... That's stupid.
(Yes, I am physically not near most of my computers).

[schwarzman]

Who would that be?

My bet is on HP. It is the only one of the "big three" (Dell, Lenovo, HP) currently missing.

[schwarzman]

Gnome software just acts as a frontend for fwupd. And they in turn have been working pretty hard to make sure they don't corrupt the bios.

And fwupd is only a frontend for AMI implementation of UpdateCapsule in their UEFI. And obviously AMI trusts fwupd enough so they make LVFS an officially supported option. So that means the implementation is pretty much rock-solid. :-)