Mark Tinberg wrote:
On Sat, Sep 06, 2014 at 09:46:36AM -0500, Valeri Galtsev wrote:
But that is exactly what I said: if the hardware was released and sold with this piece of crap BIOS, then you shouldn't be buying that junk in the first place. Or at least stop buying the crap made by _this_ manufacturer in a future. I'm still not convinced. Any better reasons?
In my experience, all code has bugs. Instead of trying to find some vendor that has magically released hardware with bug-free firmware, I choose vendors that make it relatively painless to apply the firmware updates under Linux.
A lack of updates can also mean that there is a lack of effort or
competence
is tracking down and fixing bugs, or not a large enough customer base with the same bugs to generate sufficient, actionable, bug reports, it is not necessarily or even primarily a signal of quality.
I might also point out that there are really *not* a lot of BIOS manufacturers. AMI, and - is Phoenix still doing them? - and Dell claims it's got its own, but who knows what they've rebranded. Once you consider that, then you need to consider the board maker. Some seem to do a lot better job of qa/qc than others. For example, some folks here like Supermicro, where I *REALLY* don't - many of our Penguins, which are rebranded SuperMicro, have a *lot* of issues with the m/b.
mark
mark