Lenovo To Make Its BIOS/UEFI Updates Easier For Linux Users Via LVFS (phoronix.com) 62
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.
Linux on Lenovo was always pretty easy. (Score:1)
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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 yo
Re: Linux on Lenovo was always pretty easy. (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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Argument 1: Trackpoint have been shown to be actually slower and less accurate then track pads. (while I do like Trackpoint myself, because it keeps my hand on the keyboard) but in terms of mouse ability is is worse.
Argument 2: Telling you boss to pay more for a laptop because you can put it back together easier after you take it apart, will bring up the question on why are you taking it apart in the first place.
Argument 3: Your job is to use the computer not to fix it. They have global system contracts fo
Apple-style (Score:2)
There are reasons to open a laptop other than fixing it. Expanding memory, adding optional modules, upgrading storage, etc.. Most of those are quick and trivial
You know, the exact list of things that Apple was brave and courageous to SOLDER ON their supposedly "pro" range of laptops.
being able to manage it in a few minutes at a convenient time in the office greatly offsets the hassle of scheduling on-site service - let alone overnight or any other service type of "send it in" service.
And you can count on Apple's service being not "same-day / over-night", because they don't allow shops to keep local stock of replacement parts for the latest Pro models(need to ship a broken part in, before receiving the replacement part). Apparently to avoid some replacements ending up on ebay black market.
My current laptop is a Dell Latitude business laptop (there's exactly ONE sing
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Argument 1: Trackpoint have been shown to be actually slower and less accurate then track pads. (while I do like Trackpoint myself, because it keeps my hand on the keyboard) but in terms of mouse ability is is worse.
Analyzing speed without considering ergonomics is the sort of thing a lazy manufacturer would do. It doesn't make sense to analyze it that way.
As for taking a computer apart, a DIY procedure is much faster than what even the highest tier of support can offer. At a small company, this would be completely appropriate.
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The issue isn't comparing a ThinkPad with a business caliber laptop. But convincing to get ThinkPads compared to the Cheapo sub $600 laptop with the same specs at best buy.
I take it you work for a pathetically small business? No company that has a global contract in place for anything would be buying a consumer laptop.
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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 w
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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.
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It's more a testament to how much Linux wirelsss networking has advanced than anything. Because 10 years ago, wireless networking was still in the "iffy" stage. If you had the right chipset, everything is good. If you had the wrong chipset (typically Broadcom) it wouldn't work. Broadcom was typically annoying i
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That Superfish program really helps the install. Makes it go super smoothly.
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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 wo
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Who cares. Lenevo can screw itself until it starts selling or more accurately giving away Linux fresh from the box. I am not paying for a fucking piece of shit Windows anal probe 10 licence for fucking nothing, I would rather buy Apple. Lenevo wants to claim Linux support than do it out of the fucking box, otherwise they can fuck off.
Great name; "LVFS" (Score:3)
I thought that it was a file system that your BIOS could mount ;-)
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Ok here are some links:
A Lightweight Video Storage File System for IP Camera-Based Surveillance Applications:
https://link.springer.com/chap... [springer.com]
Liquid Virtual File System:
https://github.com/LiquidFM/lv... [github.com]
LVFS: A scalable big data scientific storage system:
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/do... [ieee.org]
etc. etc.
So I expected LVFS to mean yet another some flavor of an LV file system. I guess what I find confusing is a four letter acronym ending with "FS" but then again, nobody should have exclusivity. I probably would have c
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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.
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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.
Have you even looked at Lenovo's support page? BIOS/UEFI updates are pretty much the category where updates are painless for Linux users since those updates are provided optionally as bootable disk images (based on some DOS system I think). In contrast, firmware updates for a lot of things (Wifi cards, network cards, GSM and so on) tend to be available only as Windows programs/drivers.
But the BIOS pretty much was the thing that was always reasonably easy to keep updated (I do remember that I had to fiddle
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About the only thing I remember for those was that IBM supplied a program that wrote the disk out since it came as a disk image. The disk image of course contained PC-DOS (IBM, remember?).
But the last machine I had with IBM as a true builder was a Windows 95 ThinkPad and thus even the DOS disk image writers still worked on it.
Alt
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Being this is a feature common in Windows system... I don't see this a big change. Other then not needing windows to do the upgrade.
Nitpicking : not firmware (Score:2)
Actually, to nitpick : you do NOT get user space to the Firmware.
Since UEFI, the firmware locks-down irreversibly lots of low-level access once its start to boot the OS.
It's impossible to recover these low-level access unless you reboot completely.
Thus these low-level access are only up and available while the UEFI firmware is active, they cannot be available while the OS is running.
Instead, it uses an approach called capsule :
- the userspace part just gives a plain file to the UEFI. And that's it. It does
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Most I know who run Linux also run Windows in a duel boot function anyway.
Is that the one where Linux and Windows fight to the death with rapiers?
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Dell has a solution to this that Lenovo should be able to implement: The ability to install BIOS updates from a flash drive straight from the boot options menu. No hacks or "firmware services" needed. Actually I am surprised that they don't (but I don't have much experience with modern Thinkpads, so they may already have the capability already).
Simply put the BIOS update file onto a FAT32 formatted flash drive, restart the system and press the key to bring up the boot menu (on Dell's it is F12), select the
BIOS yes, UEFI not anymore (Score:2)
With a BIOS based machine, it works this way indeed, with a DOS boot (an OS that has no protection whatsover and could directly talk to the flasher to flash a new bios).
With UEFI that not the case anymore. Lots of low-level functionality (including flashing) is locked-down once the OS is booted. This is irreversible, a OS cannot reclaim the flashing capability, you need to reboot the machine back into UEFI.
In that case, the upgrade is simply a file.
This file can be either directly selected from a built-in f
It works (Score:1)
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When is Linux going to work properly on X1 Tablet Gen3? launched in Feb, still trackpoint/buttons not working, suspend not working.
Looks like patches have been available for some time, some discussion here. [reddit.com] Maybe just not landed in your distro yet. Make sure your bios is updated to current and check around to see which firmware packages you need. If you still have issues then get on a forum, Slashdot isn't ideal.
Suh-weet. (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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I also notice that many or most enthusiast motherboards are shipping with Windows-independent bios updaters now.
They always have. You just slot in your 3.5" floppy and go on your way. :-)
No seriously... I don't think I've ever seen a BIOS update that depended on Windows. If anything most updates used to depend on either a bootable device, or worked from within the BIOS itself.
Why does this need to be hard? (Score:5, Informative)
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)
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There have been some such projects, especially libreboot. The program has produced good quality working BIOS's over the years. Sadly, it's also suffered some unnecessary political turmoil due to its lead developer making some unfounded accusations of transgender discrimination. This was covered here, https://yro.slashdot.org/story... [slashdot.org]
It's not hard (Score:2)
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)
And that's what the various user-space "updater" (Windows, or TFA's Linux, or even a few older DOS for those who use that) actually do :
they simply provide the file to the UEFI firmware and tell "please on the next reboot, use this file".
Since UEFI, user-space program cannot have the necessary access to perform the flashing themselves any more, it's locked-up when handing control from UEFI to OS.
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)
The point here is *unattended upgrade*. A windows .EXE upgrade means that it can be part of some "update" softw
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... (or even this new Linux thing)
It spells GNU/Linux.
FreeDOS and a USB stick (Score:2)
There are already working solutions for this. For example, having FreeDOS [freedos.org] on a USB drive, downloading the BIOS to it, and booting from it is very simple.
Did it on my Dell Latitude a while back, and got the latest BIOS on it without any issues.
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