document updated 14 years ago, on Sep 1, 2009
Our goal is to have a piece of software that runs, and, with minimal user-interaction, selects the proper firmware to upgrade the current computer's BIOS.
- automatically detect what kind of BIOS the current computer has (ie. from a script running inside Linux, or something like that)
- launch the correct BIOS firmware upgrade (either via MEMDISK, or a native-Linux upgrader)
automatically detecting the current BIOS model#
- dmidecode, which includes several individual tools:
- dmidecode — general BIOS (DMI information only)
- biosdecode — general BIOS information (non-DMI information only)
- ownership — Compaq-specific information
- vpddecode — IBM-specific information
- `lshw` includes the code from dmidecode
- (Dell-specific) libsmbios
upgrading the firmware
Launching MEMDISK after Linux has booted
- does kexec ⇒ SYSLINUX ⇒ MEMDISK ⇒ MS-DOS work?
Upgrading the BIOS from Linux