I imagine they would do the yellow highlight on their messages, so you could just as easily skim through the thread and stop when you see the highlighted message. Asking others to voice their complaints elsewhere in a likely less visible thread at the very least gives the impression of minimizing the complaints.
Iām also only following this thread because nothing gets updated here:
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True. I guess I should restrict myself to asking @moderators to do their job and spin off that discussion in its own thread where, I think, it would actually be more visible.
But then it seems they are not interested in doing so immediately and you do not seem interested in letting this drop, so iāll just be muting this thread and hope that somehow I will learn about the BIOS updates in some other way than this unfortunate thread.
Update on post-launch BIOS updates
As I shared in an earlier post, weāve been working with our upstream suppliers to get dedicated staffing place for post-launch BIOS updates. Until now, weāve been doing releases like this 3.06 Beta with borrowed resourcing from those suppliers, which meant that when we found regressions in it, we couldnāt 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 canāt be done via LVFS, and those can use a manual EFI update process instead.
- If the Beta does uncover blocking issues, weāll communicate that, and go back to step 2.
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Finally, something worth reading.
Although this process seems like it should have been something initiated 1 year, 2 months and 21 days ago.
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However valid that feeling is, it was profoundly unhelpful to say
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Thank you for the update.
@nrp thank you very much for the update.
I read your earlier update and the additional background provided in this post adds much needed context and detail. Understanding that there will be a rotation, that you have a vendor who is now contractually obligated directly to you, and the specificity of the Beta to Stable roadmap make all the difference to me at least.
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How long is each cycle for each product? e.g. Does it mean weāll be able to see regular periodic updates going forward?
Edit: Iām asking because this, together with the complexity of the issues / bugs / features, and the runway, will contribute to how many BIOS updates per model weāll see annually, and the timeliness of the fixes.
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@NRP thank you, thank you thank you. Honestly the BIOS updates have been the worst part of the Framework experience and its good to see there will be contracts and a process to get this normalized in the future.
Its one of the few reasons I cant recommend everyone gets a Framework as you need to have the patience and skills to be able to work with trying to communicate the bugs and get them addressed so they can hopefully get involved in the once a year updates that seem to have been possible in the past.
As an EUC Architect for a Fortune 200, I know the importance of regular firmware updates especially during that first 12 month period as bugs and comparability issues are discovered as your userbase finds more random crazy things to plug into and new ways to use their notebooks.
I look forward to seeing this rough edge get addressed. 
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Thank you for the update @nrp
Very happy to see the bios issue progress in a meaningful fashion.
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Is the contract only negotiated or did they sign it already? (Since they still need to reallocate or hire new team members)
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In the above public released statement has this so please why did they lie about it then.
ā¦āThunderbolt is unbelievably complex technology. When we ran certification testing the first time around, we passed hundreds of test casesā¦ and failed dozens. Weāve worked with our manufacturing partner and chip suppliers over the last two years to address each test failure through firmware modifications, and now have fully compliant firmware and hardware!ā
I donāt see how that was a lie. Thunderbolt is just a certification by Intel. The hardware was already there to begin with on 12th gen, just that testing needed to be done in order to ensure it met Intelās standards. The BIOS update introduce tweaks to improve behaviour of various components to meet the specified standards. Even as a beta update, that promise has been fulfilled.
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My questions from August havenāt been answered yet that I know of. Do we have answers to these yet?
Re-posting them here for convenience:
- For how long do mainboards receive security updates after launch?
- How quickly should we expect updates after disclosure of vulnerabilities?
If there isnāt any answer available for those questions, then I have a followup:
- Is the companyās policy on firmware support going to get any more fleshed out in the foreseeable future?
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Crickets ā¦
In their last email on the 61wh battery, they did mention āNote that while the 61Wh Battery is electrically compatible with all Framework Laptop 13 models, youāll need to update your BIOS on 11th Gen and 12th Gen systems to unlock the additional capacity. The 11th Gen 3.19 BIOS update is ready now, while the 12th Gen update is in development.ā
Framework has made it clear in the past that while employees may post on the forums from time to time, this is a user forum, and any questions posed to the team here may not get answered (that is an entirely fair business practice) If you want the most official answers to these questions, someone should put them in a support request, where they will be answered by a Framework employee properly.
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