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Comment by sidkshatriya | Hacker News Reader

> It seems that things wouldn't work without a BIOS update: PyTorch was unable to find the GPU. This was easily done on the BIOS settings: it was able to connect to my Wifi network and download it automatically.

Call me traditional but I find it a bit scary for my BIOS to be connecting to WiFi and doing the downloading. Makes me wonder if the new BIOS blob would be secure i.e. did the BIOS connect over securely over https ? Did it check for the appropriate hash/signature etc. ? I would suppose all this is more difficult to do in the BIOS. I would expect better security if this was done in user space in the OS.

I'm much prefer if the OS did the actual downloading followed by the BIOS just doing the installation of the update.

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I have never seen a BIOS that didn't allow offline updates? However SSL is much less processing then a WPA2 WiFi stack, I would certainly expect this to be fully secure and boycot a manufacturer who failed. Conversely updating your BIOS without worrying if your OS is rooted is nice.

Updating your BIOS without worrying if your OS is rooted can be easily and more securely done from an USB memory.

The BIOSes recent enough to be able to connect through the Internet normally have the option to use a USB memory from inside the BIOS setup.

Some motherboards can update the BIOS from a USB memory even without a CPU in the socket.

You don't HAVE to update the bios over wifi, fwupd is perfectly able to do it as well.

Isn't this pretty much standard in this day and age? HP for example also has this option in BIOS for their laptops (but you still can either download the BIOS blob manually in Linux or use the automatic updater in Windows if you want).

> Isn't this pretty much standard in this day and age?

If something is "standard" nowadays does it mean it is the right way to go ?

One of my main issues is that this means your BIOS has to have a WiFi software stack in it, have a TLS stack in it etc. Basically millions of lines of extra code. Most of it in a blob never to be seen by more than a few engineers.

Though in another a way allowing BIOS to perform self updates is good because it doesn't matter if you've installed FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Linux, Windows, <any other os> you will be able to update your BIOS.

I fully expect any BIOS to have millions of unnecessary lines of code already though. May as well have a bit more for user convenience.

> If something is "standard" nowadays does it mean it is the right way to go ?

Next thing you'll be telling me that you have a problem piping internet hosted install scripts directly into shell!

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