On Sep 8, 2014, at 11:57 AM, Valeri Galtsev <galtsev at kicp.uchicago.edu> wrote: > > On Mon, September 8, 2014 9:19 am, Mark Tinberg wrote: >> >> On Sep 6, 2014, at 3:42 PM, Valeri Galtsev <galtsev at kicp.uchicago.edu> >> wrote: >> >>> On Sat, September 6, 2014 2:27 pm, Jonathan Billings wrote: >>>> >>>> I choose vendors that make it relatively painless to apply the firmware >>>> updates under Linux. >>> >>> This is only so for either very rich, who can afford to have stand by >>> hardware to replace bricked by flashing box, or very happy to the level >>> they don't care that the box will not come back up in next 5 min. I am >>> definitely neither of two… >> >> I’ve used mostly Dell and have done a thousand firmware updates in my time >> and I’ve never seen a piece of hardware bricked, their update system takes >> all due precaution, so the problem just isn’t as dire as you make it out >> to be, even anecdotally it is statistically improbable, either I am a >> massive outlier or you are way overestimating. > > Certainly the last: it is me who is scared to take 1:10000 chance. > Speaking of Dell: we use only lowest end of their boxes (think 32 GB quad > core CPU _Desktop_ today) which are en par with others price wise, yet > very reliable. Never had to flash BIOS on these, and never had one failed > because of me not having BIOS updates flashed routinely... As far as > servers are concerned, these are tyan mostly. I do not re-flash their BIOS > routinely. (And I doubt they release tons of BIOS upgrades, at the very > most one per board during its lifetime which never sounded "do it or your > box is dead tomorrow".) So, I maybe flashed BIOS 3-4 times per maybe 200 > machines... Never had box bricked due to flashing. (Still...) And never > had failure due to not doing "preventive" re-flashing. But after all: > maybe I'm just extremely lucky ;-) and at the same time awfully scared (to > fix something that shouldn't be broken IMHO). > My sense that the bugs which are being fixed by the server firmware vendors updates are very very rare but they have big enough customers who demand fixes to spend the engineering effort in finding and fixing these subtle issues whereas the whitebox vendors don’t sell enough of a single model and don’t have the high-touch relationship with customers to really care, there are probably just as many subtle bugs in their designs but they are focused on getting the next motherboard manufactured, not fixing problems with last years model that they don’t sell anymore. — Mark Tinberg mtinberg at wisc.edu