On Mon, Oct 09, 2006 at 05:31:30PM +0200, Arjan van de Ven wrote: > > Further, if a vendor has an updated BIOS and it's suitable for > > redistribution in Fedora, why can't we include that BIOS image and ask > > the user if he wants to flash his BIOS? > > we don't need to. Dell has a nice yum repo for this (vendor neutral); > that is much more the right approach than including stuff on a CD Arjan and Peter both mentioned this, so let me give the pointer. http://fwupdate.com/. Latest BIOS for 216 Dell systems and instructions for how to use it. > > hooks into, for example, HAL and provides the implementation for an > > UpdateFirmware() method. > > that btw is really really hard as general thing. Only one or two vendors > have linux flash tools and usually it's mobo specific even. get the > wrong one and you have a brick The firmware-tools project (the software behind fwupdate.com) is designed to explicitly be a plugin framework only. To update Dell systems, you install firmware-addon-dell which makes its functions available. Likewise, we've talked with other major hardware vendors about them providing their own firmware-addon-$vendor. This is the right approach, so no one group is expected to know all the nuances of all types of systems ever produced anywhere. If your vendor doesn't have a plugin yet, politely ask them. As for installing updated DSDTs at runtime, while it's a great debugging tool and fun for developers, I don't think it's good end user solution, and isn't long-term sustainable by the Linux developer community, exactly because they lack some knowledge about the system they're patching. I agree that working with the system providers is the right solution. To that end, if you've got serious issues with a Dell system, you can always post to linux-poweredge@xxxxxxxx or linux-precision@xxxxxxxx with the details and your proposed fix, and we'll make sure it gets in front of the right BIOS teams. (Even if it's a desktop or notebook.) (Subscribe at http://lists.us.dell.com to post.) And yes, our test teams are using Arjan's firmware test kit now - thanks Arjan! Thanks, Matt -- Matt Domsch Software Architect Dell Linux Solutions linux.dell.com & www.dell.com/linux Linux on Dell mailing lists @ http://lists.us.dell.com -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
