3 ms·

I think any firmware that's complicated enough that the manufacturer gets it wrong should be open-source. Especially if the manufacturer is deliberately crippli

I think any firmware that's complicated enough that the manufacturer gets it wrong should be open-source. Especially if the manufacturer is deliberately crippling the product with bad firmware rather than just accidentally through incompetence. And firmware that's too simple to screw over the user is probably too simple to be eligible for copyright protection to begin with. A motherboard BIOS is not at all a marginal case. BIOS bugs abound, as can be seen by booting Linux on almost any PC and looking through the kernel logs for ACPI table errors and various other workarounds and quirks being activated.

petsfed 4y ago
I think you're talking past the parent's point here. Firmware as I understand it (also as a microcontroller firmware programmer) is about the same as what the parent understands. I think your metric about "too simple to screw over the user" is sort of weird, when in the context of my work and the parent's work, "screw over the user" might well mean "disabled the oxygen pump on the user's space suit". It is in that sense that motherboard Bios is a marginal case. It is marginal in the sense that BIOSes are clearly at the margin between embedded microcontroller firmware and full-blown general-purpose-computer operating system. If I have to update the BIOS on my computer every month (or every week) just for it to boot into any operating system, then something is incredibly wrong, even as modern BIOS have become several orders of magnitude more complex today.
- wtallis 4y ago
  Firmware problems don't have to be severe enough to put human lives at risk to be a real problem. There are tons of examples of bad firmware leading to broken power or thermal management leading to crippled performance or battery life or excessive fan noise. WiFi NICs have subsumed large parts of the network driver stack and in doing so have made it impossible to implement effective QoS, leaving users stuck with stupid radio behaviors that hurt the performance of every device operating on the same channel. None of what I'm proposing would lead to a bios update every month, except in the initial period of fixing the worst of the manufacturer's mistakes. "Firmware" as I'm using it would still be trying to present a stable interface to the rest of the system and not inherently be a moving target of constant feature creep in addition to the bug fixes.
AdamH12113 4y ago
By "marginal", I was thinking more of whether a BIOS is possible to ignore. The vast majority of PC owners never update their BIOS at all. If you buy a motherboard a couple years after its release, there may not be any significant updates from the manufacturer. It's not like the OS where you're downloading updates multiple times a month. This is separate from the question of whether the BIOS should be open source. I'm inclined to think that it should, especially after the motherboard has been out for a few years.
- ac29 4y ago
  > The vast majority of PC owners never update their BIOS at all. I wonder if this is true now that Windows will do it automatically. I have been more than once surprised to see a computer updating its firmware after a Windows reboot.
  - wtallis 4y ago
    Pretty much all laptops are getting firmware updates delivered through Windows Update (or a vendor-specific automatic tool), and usually for several components rather than just the motherboard UEFI firmware. And they definitely need those fixes, because the annual cadence of product refreshes means they're shipping from the factory half-baked

petsfed 4y ago

I think you're talking past the parent's point here. Firmware as I understand it (also as a microcontroller firmware programmer) is about the same as what the parent understands. I think your metric about "too simple to screw over the user" is sort of weird, when in the context of my work and the parent's work, "screw over the user" might well mean "disabled the oxygen pump on the user's space suit". It is in that sense that motherboard Bios is a marginal case. It is marginal in the sense that BIOSes are clearly at the margin between embedded microcontroller firmware and full-blown general-purpose-computer operating system. If I have to update the BIOS on my computer every month (or every week) just for it to boot into any operating system, then something is incredibly wrong, even as modern BIOS have become several orders of magnitude more complex today.

wtallis 4y ago
Firmware problems don't have to be severe enough to put human lives at risk to be a real problem. There are tons of examples of bad firmware leading to broken power or thermal management leading to crippled performance or battery life or excessive fan noise. WiFi NICs have subsumed large parts of the network driver stack and in doing so have made it impossible to implement effective QoS, leaving users stuck with stupid radio behaviors that hurt the performance of every device operating on the same channel. None of what I'm proposing would lead to a bios update every month, except in the initial period of fixing the worst of the manufacturer's mistakes. "Firmware" as I'm using it would still be trying to present a stable interface to the rest of the system and not inherently be a moving target of constant feature creep in addition to the bug fixes.

AdamH12113 4y ago

By "marginal", I was thinking more of whether a BIOS is possible to ignore. The vast majority of PC owners never update their BIOS at all. If you buy a motherboard a couple years after its release, there may not be any significant updates from the manufacturer. It's not like the OS where you're downloading updates multiple times a month. This is separate from the question of whether the BIOS should be open source. I'm inclined to think that it should, especially after the motherboard has been out for a few years.

ac29 4y ago
> The vast majority of PC owners never update their BIOS at all. I wonder if this is true now that Windows will do it automatically. I have been more than once surprised to see a computer updating its firmware after a Windows reboot.
- wtallis 4y ago
  Pretty much all laptops are getting firmware updates delivered through Windows Update (or a vendor-specific automatic tool), and usually for several components rather than just the motherboard UEFI firmware. And they definitely need those fixes, because the annual cadence of product refreshes means they're shipping from the factory half-baked