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>But the average person (or even the average IT dept) does not want to open their machine to update the BIOS. I happily updated BIOS until I experienced a cata

>But the average person (or even the average IT dept) does not want to open their machine to update the BIOS. I happily updated BIOS until I experienced a catastrophic failure that bricked the board, don't know how. Since then I'm terrified of updating BIOS. I've also experienced UEFI conflicts(?) loading linux to new boards that took forever to sort out. It seems BIOS development has not progressed as well or far as one might expect, but that may just be me and my klutzy bad luck.

cesarb 5y ago
> I happily updated BIOS until I experienced a catastrophic failure that bricked the board, don't know how. Since then I'm terrified of updating BIOS. My experience with BIOS updates has been mixed. The first time I did a BIOS update, it added an option to tell it that the HDD connection had 80 wires instead of 40 wires, which enabled a faster transfer mode. The second time I did a BIOS update (on that same machine), however, it made the realtime clock lose touch with reality, apparently running twice as fast, so I had to revert this update. That put me off from doing BIOS updates for a while. My latest laptop can be updated through LVFS (using UEFI capsule updates), and it's new and under warranty, so I decided to risk it. One of the first BIOS updates I did made, according to its release notes, an important-looking change to the battery management. Some time later, the laptop started crashing randomly (the crashes happened when the display turned off, but not every time). After a lot of searching, I found out that a later BIOS update made some unknown change which causes these crashes, unless you add "i915.enable_dc=0" to the kernel command line. For now, I'll keep risking it (at least while it's still under warranty), and hope no other obscure BIOS-update-caused bugs happen (and I'll probably keep using "i915.enable_dc=0" on this laptop forever, since there's no way to know whether a later BIOS fixed it).

cesarb 5y ago

> I happily updated BIOS until I experienced a catastrophic failure that bricked the board, don't know how. Since then I'm terrified of updating BIOS. My experience with BIOS updates has been mixed. The first time I did a BIOS update, it added an option to tell it that the HDD connection had 80 wires instead of 40 wires, which enabled a faster transfer mode. The second time I did a BIOS update (on that same machine), however, it made the realtime clock lose touch with reality, apparently running twice as fast, so I had to revert this update. That put me off from doing BIOS updates for a while. My latest laptop can be updated through LVFS (using UEFI capsule updates), and it's new and under warranty, so I decided to risk it. One of the first BIOS updates I did made, according to its release notes, an important-looking change to the battery management. Some time later, the laptop started crashing randomly (the crashes happened when the display turned off, but not every time). After a lot of searching, I found out that a later BIOS update made some unknown change which causes these crashes, unless you add "i915.enable_dc=0" to the kernel command line. For now, I'll keep risking it (at least while it's still under warranty), and hope no other obscure BIOS-update-caused bugs happen (and I'll probably keep using "i915.enable_dc=0" on this laptop forever, since there's no way to know whether a later BIOS fixed it).