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> 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 exper
by 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).