Do BIOS Upgrades Really Matter?

inkfox asks: "It seems that whenever one buys a motherboard, there's already a BIOS upgrade available by the time you get your hands on it, usually dealing with some degenerate hardware behavior. Given that Linux and Windows 2000/XP replace all BIOS routines once loaded, do these upgrades really matter? If a system is successfully booting, is a BIOS upgrade more a risk than it is preventive maintenance?" This may be true, but what if you are running an OS that depends on the BIOS? If the BIOS is replaced by a specific OS, then BIOS upgrades can't really hurt anything, can they?

Comments

What about other BIOS'es?

[fille]

Last week, I had to flash my CD-writer to get it working. Since the thing uses an USB-connection, the risk of destroying the hardware seems far higher then for a motherboard BIOS update. An interruption in the datastream is not that uncommon (yes, I use Windows) but what are the results of that?

Has somebody of the slashdot crowd nasty experiences with flashing other hardware?

You can put your OS *in* the BIOS....

[Ashurbanipal]

Check out www.linuxbios.org and you'll see that you DON'T need a BIOS to run your OS. Since modern OSes don't use the BIOS anyway, you can replace it with your bootloader and boot your machine in less than 3 seconds.

The big beowulfs all seem to be moving to this method now (combined with wake-on-lan) to save power.

Perhaps calling the other guy a moron was a bit, um, premature?

Re:More than just code

[sigwinch]

If you're having PROBLEMS with something, by all means upgrade, even if you don't think your OS is actually calling any code in the BIOS.

There's something called System Management Mode used by many modern motherboards, where the CPU is periodically interrupted and runs code from the BIOS. Motherboard designers use it for all kinds of stuff: emulating the keyboard controller, monitoring CPU temperature, etc. In general there's no way to know what SMM is used for; the OS just has to get out of the way and pray.

OS designers generally regard SMM as a dangerous kluge, and think that the tasks would be better done using a microcontroller integrated into the chipset. The problem is that (brain-damaged) motherboard designers don't see it that way...