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Lenovo To Make Its BIOS/UEFI Updates Easier For Linux Users Via LVFS (phoronix.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Lenovo is making it easier for their customers running Linux to update their firmware now on ThinkPad, ThinkStation, and ThinkCenter hardware. Lenovo has joined the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) and following collaboration with the upstream developers is beginning to roll-out support for offering their device firmware on this platform so it can be easily updated by users with the fwupd stack. Kudos to all involved especially with Lenovo ThinkPads being very popular among Linux users.
I thought that it was a file system that your BIOS could mount ;-)
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
Only that it has been available forever. The only problem was that while killing a BIOS from userspace was always easy, updating it successfully was not.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
That is the annoying thing about buying computers. Trying to compare say a Think Pad vs a Cheap Laptop makes it nearly impossible.
The both show the same Specs. But there are these tiny changes which are not advertised or explained.
And it makes it harder for you to explain why you want to pay more.
USB3 can handle 5gbs of data. Which is enough for most devices... However the issue comes in when you start using multiple devices at the same time. So that USB SSD if is doing a lot of reading, will slow down your network speed. Due to USB being Serial.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I have ran across some problems with Think Pads in the past. About 10 years ago Work gave me a Think Pad that just wouldn't load the wireless network card. To make it worse, I worked in a Linux shop, I was the only person (with that model of laptop) who was using Windows for development, just because I couldn't move from my desk if I were in Linux.
That said, I hadn't had much trouble with other models.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
And it makes it harder for you to explain why you want to pay more.
It's really not that hard with a ThinkPad to explain why I am willing to pay more*. First, it is the only laptop that is standard with a usable pointing device; the trackpoint is orders of magnitude better than any touchpad ever created by anyone, ever. Second, even to this day Lenovo has continued the IBM tradition of always making the field manuals available for every laptop they make, and they continue to be excellent documents. If I need to replace some minor part it will tell me every screw I need to remove to get to it, how long it is, what kind of threads it has, and how much torque to apply to properly tighten it back down. ThinkPads are still made to be serviced by any reasonably competent person, as opposed to most other consumer (or even business) laptops that want customers to send them in instead. And of course, if I really don't want to do it myself, their on-site warranty is great too.
*if you actually price them out, a ThinkPad is usually no more expensive than any other business caliber laptop. Toss out the junk that is sold at retail today as it isn't worth considering anyways.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
BIOS updates can be a problem even when the hardware itself works perfectly with Linux. Thinkpads have been great, as Lenovo provides bootable DOS images for the updater. In contrast, my Lenovo Legion only has BIOS updates for Windows. This announcement seems to focus on the Think* market, so no practical change for Linux users.
This year's rush of BIOS updates seems to be about the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities, more specifically CPU microcode updates. Linux has other ways to update those, so I wouldn't worry too much about BIOS side.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Sweet. I also notice that many or most enthusiast motherboards are shipping with Windows-independent bios updaters now. This suggests the Linux component of the enthusiast segment is signifcant. Another motivation would be, you see no end of forum posts about people bricking their motherboard because of running the bios update with the Windows utility.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
On my Gigabyte motherboard, I download the new BIOS, stick it on a small FAT partition on an external drive I have for various things, boot into the BIOS and pick "upgrade". The BIOS will then read the firmware from the FAT partition in question, verify it then install it before rebooting automatically. I am sure if I stuck the BIOS on a thumb drive it would work as well (except that I would need to find a thumb drive whereas the extra partition on the existing external HDD is easy to work with)
Why can't everyone make it that easy rather than needing to run a Windows exe or boot from a special DOS boot disk or something (or even this new Linux thing)
USB3 can handle 5gbs of data. Which is enough for most devices... However the issue comes in when you start using multiple devices at the same time. So that USB SSD if is doing a lot of reading, will slow down your network speed. Due to USB being Serial.
It's not so much being serial as the master/slave structure that slows it down with multiple devices.
The computer host chip is the master, all else are slaves, and slaves can't talk until spoken to.
So the computer needs to set aside time on the wire for querying each and every USB device it knows of to see if it has anything to send, and if it does have something to send it gets an equal share of time as anything else.
I heard usb 3, or is that usb c, was supposed to support device-to-device communications without involving the host, but thankfully I haven't been that deep into USB specifics since then.
This is why firewire at 400mbit felt so much faster than USB2 at 480mbit.
Firewire being based off SCSI could have any device talk to any other, the host was nothing special just one more ID on the bus. Having one drive send data to another drive without pestering the host and taking time away from other things was just something USB2 and earlier couldn't do.
Even sata and sas are both serial interfaces for disks, and sas 4 can go up to like 22 gbs. It's really fast not due to being serial (or being not serial as you imply) but because each drive gets its own serial lines to the disk controller and they are not shared with other disks.