Update on post-launch BIOS updates
As I shared in an earlier post, we’ve been working with our upstream suppliers to get dedicated staffing place for post-launch BIOS updates. Until now, we’ve been doing releases like this 3.06 Beta with borrowed resourcing from those suppliers, which meant that when we found regressions in it, we couldn’t get the necessary support to resolve them and ship a final version. Now, we have a negotiated contract for a dedicated team to provide ongoing software work post-launch.
The contract is the starting point. From here, our supplier needs to reallocate or hire the new team members, and we need to work with that team to get them up to speed on our hardware and codebase. The first project this team is working on will be 12th Gen BIOS. After that, they will be rotating between releases on 11th Gen, 12th Gen, 13th Gen, Ryzen 7040 Series, and future products as needed.
Our overall release process will be:
- We identify field issues through customer support or security issues through our automated analysis or notices from our upstream providers.
- We roadmap the development work to resolve these issues with the sustaining software team, some of which may depend on other work from suppliers further upstream.
- We do internal testing and validation on a new software release.
- We release a Community Beta.
- After a two week Beta period, if we have sufficient test feedback and do not see launch blocking regressions, we promote the release to final both as an .exe for Windows and via LVFS on Linux. Some releases may have firmware updates that can’t be done via LVFS, and those can use a manual EFI update process instead.
- If the Beta does uncover blocking issues, we’ll communicate that, and go back to step 2.