HP BIOS Management/Configuration Driver Coming For Linux 6.6

[phoronix]

Phoronix: HP BIOS Management/Configuration Driver Coming For Linux 6.6

Similar to the Dell WMI system management driver and Lenovo's Think-LMI driver, the HP-BIOSCFG driver now poised for introduction in Linux 6.6 allows for managing and configuring BIOS settings on capable HP laptops/desktops from under Linux itself...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/HP-BIOSCFG-For-Linux-6.6

[MorrisS.]

An excellent feature for users.

[uid313]

Is there any application with a GUI that works across motherboards from different manufacturers?

[Dark-Show]

Always enjoyed HP laptops, company driven support for linux makes me want to always chose HP for my laptops.

[horizonbrave]

Always enjoyed HP laptops, company driven support for linux makes me want to always chose HP for my laptops.

Except that their keyboard are crap and crap themselves way too early. IIRC they also put limitations in the bios for preventing hardware upgrades

[Dark-Show]

Except that their keyboard are crap and crap themselves way too early. IIRC they also put limitations in the bios for preventing hardware upgrades

I've never really had a problem with the keyboards, but I'm sure we all type differently. The BIOS however I agree with, I had an issue on one HP laptop where the intel ME crapped out with 'ME State in Recovery'. With the locked BIOS and crappy EFI management tools reflashing it was pure WIN10 on a usb hell, which didn't even work. Turns out the Intel ME likes to implode and restrict your system in weird ways, and BIOS downgrade locking means I can't fix it (Same version flashing didn't work, and I'm on the last version)

[X_m7]

IIRC they also put limitations in the bios for preventing hardware upgrades

I have seen quite a lot of reports of HP preventing the WiFi chipset from being replaced/upgraded with a different model in their laptops in the past, gave me quite a scare since I only thought to look that up after I've ordered an Intel AX200 to replace the rubbish MediaTek MT7921 that came with my Omen 16 lol. Fortunately said AX200 actually did work with my Omen just fine, and I've also heard that supposedly they're stopped with the WiFi whitelist thing, and to give credit where credit is due HP has both a service manual and a YouTube video showing how to disassemble the laptop.

Now if only they had the default fan curve in the firmware set so it doesn't leave the CPU hanging around at 90+ C for quite a while before ramping the fans up, or even better have proper fan control support for Linux, although I guess that's kind of on me since my priority was getting an a Ryzen 6000 series laptop for a decent price.

[fahrenheit]

For business laptops (i.e. those where you type full day) our company average is a keyboard replacement (key retention plastic breaks, they swap out the entire keyboard) at around the 4th year. As for the rest, the service manuals are good, at least the probook and elitebook are nice for maintenance (ram, WiFi, ssd) unless you opt for stuff with soldered down stuff.
I've had no issues disabling ME, or installing freebsd (well, except for uefi to actually work until freebsd 14), linux is mostly OK.
The ryzen 3000 at least had awful fan curves which on windows was a pain as there is always some service running or some crap..

[spiral_23]

I have seen quite a lot of reports of HP preventing the WiFi chipset from being replaced/upgraded with a different model in their laptops in the past, gave me quite a scare since I only thought to look that up after I've ordered an Intel AX200 to replace the rubbish MediaTek MT7921 that came with my Omen 16 lol. Fortunately said AX200 actually did work with my Omen just fine, and I've also heard that supposedly they're stopped with the WiFi whitelist thing, and to give credit where credit is due HP has both a service manual and a YouTube video showing how to disassemble the laptop.

we are talking about buisness class laptops - like the elitebooks or zbooks. the omen is a gamer hut.

[marlock]

from a convenience and feature parity PoV it's great that this comes to linux... it's also probably just a matter of time until someone makes a vendor-agnostic GUI


on the other hand, I can't help but wonder what stops a virus, rootkit, etc from leveraging such command of the OS over the BIOS settings to mess things up... is there any way to disable this interface from the BIOS side?

ps: afaik not adding the interface to linux won't prevent it from being used elsewhere as long as it exists, so I'm not arguing against adding it, just curious how safe or stupid the interface itself is