Our focus is building products to last through upgrade and repair, and software is a critical part of that. This morning we shared more around our BIOS and driver update process to enable software longevity.
We fell short of where we needed to be on software updates, and we are making the necessary investments to not just deliver more timely releases, but also to communicate more broadly when we do.
Obviously, our words here are not enough. We need to and commit to demonstrating the results of these investments. We released new BIOS versions for our AMD laptops this week, with updaters for both Windows and Linux, and a release for Intel 12th Gen on Windows last week.
We'll continue to update you in our community channels as we release further updates, and we're developing additional notification methods for software updates as well.
@frameworkcomputer Kudos for admitting this problem and committing to fix it – rather unusual in the biz in my experience :'-)
I wish this honest communication of how firmware engineering work was handled would’ve been communicated more transparently earlier. The 11th Gen Linux users are still running 2yo CSME with critical security issues with the update being my marked as „soon“. This label raised the wrong expectations and led to lots of frustration.
@frameworkcomputer Genuine thanks for the openness and communication. Make sure to follow up and post about it when you do. I love your mission and I want to continue to see it be successful.
@frameworkcomputer realizing that there is a problem is already the first step into improvement.
I admit that I am a bit annoyed about the time it takes for the new 12th firmware to arrive, but then again, I dont urgently need it for a fix or improvement, so I am not stressing out at all.
Like always: Take your time and do it correctly. A rushed and buggy firmware is the worst that can happen right now.
@frameworkcomputer Thanks for the update! I know the answer is probably "it's complicated" at best, but I hope that open firmware like coreboot is still on the table, as an option to gain more agency over both firmware quality and longevity. (Yes I know it's very complicated and to some extent today you're always stuck with a core of FSPs and ME/PSP etc, but that would still be a sizable increase to the amount of changes you can control directly 🙏 )
@frameworkcomputer I doubt Linux is a huge part of your userbase (I'm waiting for a track point before I jump) but if you aren't already considering or doing lvfs ( https://fwupd.org/ ) it's absolutely worth looking into.
@warthog9@frameworkcomputer They're already on LVFS, and distributing through there for some models. Others are still marked testing rather than stable, but based on their forums at least that's on the list for firmware maintenance already 🤞
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