Re:Dell Edge Gateway 5000 to support natively flashing UEFI ...
by wmf on Wednesday February 03, 2016 @12:47AM
(#11024941)
AFAIK updating server firmware under Linux has been possible for years, so I'm curious why this required a kernel update, a bunch of new packages, and fixing hundreds of bugs. Is this a case of the standard way being 10x more complex than the proprietary way?
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Re:Dell Edge Gateway 5000 to support natively flashing UEFI ...
by creshal on Wednesday February 03, 2016 @03:31AM
(#11025402)
The new standard way is supposed to be used by all vendors, instead of a slightly different proprietary method separately maintained by each. So you'll have the usual "design by committee, with all committee members being direct rivals" bloat.
And it seems that this is one of the first actual hardware implementations of said method; the OS-side software implementation has so far only been tested against emulators. It's not that surprising to see bugs here.
Re:Dell Edge Gateway 5000 to support natively flashing UEFI ...
by gioele on Wednesday February 03, 2016 @06:27AM
(#11025894)
FWUPD is more a "from the devs but embraced by the vendors" effor: http://www.fwupd.org/developers
Re:Dell Edge Gateway 5000 to support natively flashing UEFI ...
by creshal on Wednesday February 03, 2016 @07:01AM
(#11025984)
FWUPD relies on UEFI Capsule Updates, which is the standardized firmware update method I was talking about.
Re:Dell Edge Gateway 5000 to support natively flashing UEFI ...
by DiabloD3 on Wednesday February 03, 2016 @01:16AM
(#11025008)
And even when it wasn't possible, it was either done through IPMI web UI, through BIOS being able to do it itself off a fat32 file system mounted anywhere (including IPMI fake drives), or a bootable DOS-based CD (which also can be booted via ISO fed to IPMI).
Disclaimer: I run a medium sized dedicated server host. Hi.