this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2024
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Technology

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Idea: hardware manufacturers should publish RSS feeds for firmware updates (beehaw.org)
submitted 3 months ago by IrritableOcelot@beehaw.org to c/technology@beehaw.org
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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?

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[–] OneCardboardBox@lemmy.sdf.org 21 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (4 children)

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.

[–] vahtos@programming.dev 4 points 3 months ago

It does support bios updates. That's how I do mine on my laptop (a Lenovo).

[–] narc0tic_bird@lemm.ee 3 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

BIOS/EFI updates have shown up on my ThinkPad T490 under Fedora, and I think Framework supports this feature as well with their devices.

[–] IrritableOcelot@beehaw.org 3 points 3 months ago

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!

[–] Andromxda@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 month ago

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