HP-BIOSCFG Driver Being Worked On For HP Laptop BIOS Management Under Linux

HP's commercial/business-focused laptops expose a Windows WMI interface that supports the web-based enterprise management of the BIOS configurations. The "HP-BIOSCFG" Linux driver is now being worked on to allow managing the BIOS settings for these HP laptops from within Linux.

Since late 2020 Dell's WMI system management driver on Linux has allowed managing configurable BIOS settings under Linux with capable systems. Since last year the Lenovo Think-LMI Linux driver has also added support for managing BIOS settings from within Linux on capable laptops/desktops. The configurable BIOS settings with these drivers are exposed to Linux user-space via sysfs for managing the settings directly or through indirect interfaces.

Fwupd has begun adding support for dealing with the BIOS settings and GNOME developers have also been working on making use of the BIOS configurations to better secure systems by allowing Secure Boot and other platform security features to be easily managed under Linux.

Now HP commercial/business laptops may soon be joining the party with the HP-BIOSCFG Linux driver in the works. This HP driver is set to expose its BIOS tunables under the same sysfs interface as these other existing Linux drivers. HP commercial laptops going back to 2018 have supported the WMI interface for BIOS management while only now this Linux driver is being tackled.

The HP-BIOSCFG Linux driver has been undergoing review and is currently available via the kernel mailing list with the "v2" patch series having been sent out this morning. If all goes well we could possibly see this driver mainlined for the v6.2 kernel cycle.