MSI: Update Your BIOS From The Linux Desktop

What MSI sent over was a Linux binary called afulnx_64 and is the AMI Firmware Update Utility for Linux. In the ten years of running Phoronix and being a Linux user longer than that, this is the first time I've heard of an official AMI flash utility for Linux... When searching afulnx_64, there's some other web-sites mentioning this Linux flash utility, mostly on some small Asian web-sites and it also appears to be distributed by some Gigabyte server and Lenovo ThinkServer BIOS packages. The afulnx_32 is the alternative 32-bit Linux build.

The afulnx_64 file sent over by MSI was AMI's version v5.06.01, which seems to be the newest version or at least fairly recent given the 2014 copyright. The AMI update utility is closed-source, obviously requires root privileges, and for whatever reason also needed the kernel source files in order to run... It wasn't compiling anything, loading any special kernel modules, or doing anything else odd that I noticed but wouldn't run on my Fedora 21 system until kernel-devel was installed (kernel-headers didn't cut it for the program).

From this Linux AMI Firmware Update Utility is support for saving the current ROM image to files, flashing the actual BIOS, verification testing, support for programming individual blocks, and flashing particular regions. The Linux version is pretty much on-par with the AMI Windows DOS-based utility but isn't a GUI-driven application like the more polished BIOS updating software put out by many motherboard vendors for Windows.

So far I've tested it only on the MSI X99S SLI PLUS motherboard with its newest v1.2 BIOS file and it does indeed seem to work. With the MSI X99S SLI PLUS there's also thankfully a dual-BIOS with physical BIOS switch on the motherboard PCB in case of running into problems with the flashing process. Whenever your flash your motherboard BIOS, do so with caution and at your own risk.

At this time it's not clear if MSI will be offering this file from their web-site for Linux users or how far they want to engage with Linux at this time, but things are moving forward. There's been talk of possibly having a section on our Phoronix Forums for MSI support around Linux. In my discussions with them they'll also be studying Coreboot. Is there anything else you'd like to see from MSI when it comes to Linux motherboard support? Share your thoughts and suggestions by commenting on this article.