[Discuss] Risks of BIOS (actually UEFI) updates

[Alan W. Irwin]

On 2018-11-11 13:07-0800 Jean Taggart wrote:

> Maybe I like living on the edge, but during my 10 years or so of being a computer repair technician I *always* updated bios / UEFI. Always with the goal of increasing stability. These updates always addressed memory stability issues, added features, made every thing better overall. All of my systems, both new and old run the absolute latest bios revision.
>
> Where did you hear that running an updated bios caused issues? I can think of a very limited cases, but something as new as Ryzen, that would of been the first thing I did.

Hi Jean:

I haven't had to buy many PC's since I started using Linux in 1996.
For example, my last PC lasted more than 10 years and was still going
strong when I decided to buy a new box and shut down the old one.  So
most of what I picked up about hardware is now ancient history, but I
do recall at least some of those box assemblers specifically not doing
BIOS upgrades.  But to answer your direct question for modern
hardware, that was the advice I received from the Mother Computers
Tech that assembled my latest box, and I went along with it at the
time because that jibed with that ancient history.  So thank you for
sharing your own experience which seems to indicate he may have been
too conservative (at least for modern PC's).

Alan
__________________________
Alan W. Irwin

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state
implementation for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); the Time
Ephemerides project (timeephem.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting
software package (plplot.sf.net); the libLASi project
(unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net);
and the Linux Brochure Project (lbproject.sf.net).
__________________________

Linux-powered Science
__________________________