5mo ago

Idea: hardware manufacturers should publish RSS feeds for firmware updates

To deal with all this Intel CPU disaster, I've been having to manually check MSI's website for mobo updates. It occurred to me that keeping BIOSes and other drivers that aren't delivered through your OS's update manager of choice is such a pain, and it's common knowledge that a lot of critical BIOS updates just don't get applied to systems because folks don't check for updates unless there's a problem.

Thinking about that, I realized that it would make life a lot easier if you could just have section in your RSS reader for firmware updates, and each mobo manufacturer published BIOS update announcements as an RSS feed. All your updates are in one place, and you're notified promptly! Of course, this would also apply to NVIDIA drivers, so you can get automatic updates on Windows without having to download Geforce NOW bloatware, but of course that's very intentional on NVIDIA's part.

Does anyone know of other easy ways to passively keep track of BIOS updates?

19 comments

On Linux, I run fwupdmgr to periodically check for firmware updates. Not every manufacturer supports it yet, but I've had good results with a few laptops. Not sure if it supports BIOS.
Also though, I generally try to leave my BIOS alone if everything is working fine. Unless I hear of a reason to update, I'd rather stay on a stable version.
- It does support bios updates. That's how I do mine on my laptop (a Lenovo).
- I'm not familiar with fwupdmgr, so I'm not sure either about it delivering bios updates. A good tool to know about for sure, though!
- BIOS/EFI updates have shown up on my ThinkPad T490 under Fedora, and I think Framework supports this feature as well with their devices.
- You could even set up a cron job for it, or (at least on Arch) create a Pacman hook that runs fwupdmgr every time you update your system

Cough Cough Linux
- Official Linux RSS about stable kernel releases: https://www.kernel.org/feeds/kdist.xml
- I don't think I've ever gotten bios updates via apt...not sure if that's a laptop thing, a manufacturing thing, or what.
  
  No bios update, but you most likely received both microcode updates (which is what will fix/mitigate the Intel issue, the bios is only to ensure everybody gets the microcode update) and firmware updates (from linux-firmware)
  Of course non-mainlined (i.e. not in the linux kernel) firmware is a bit more iffy, luckily it's getting slowly better with OEMs using fwupd for those scenarios

Or just email the account used for registering the part when there's an update

If the firmware updates are digitally signed sure, otherwise I don't know if I'd like knowing my system could be hijacked or bricked remotely through DNS poisoning.
- I don't mean use the RSS feed to actually deliver, I just mean a blog-style announcement. Of course, to be security conscious you shouldn't follow any links in that announcement to download it, but still.

I can’t event get my town to put the trash holiday schedule in an iCal file.
- I feel the pain

I remember that Asus did this back in the day at least, not sure if they still do. But I remember having rss feeds for at least 2 of my motherboards in my reader, back when rss was actually widely used. It's been like 10-15 years though...

They're probably just going to send out a tweet, so something that checks twatter.
- Twitter ceased to exist in July 2023.

19 comments