How long is BIOS support?

[Rei]

I can understand that FW can’t support the BIOS update forever, as we have more generations. I wonder how long is guaranteed?

[GhostLegion]

It isn’t. Except for the FW Chromebook that gets 10 years updates from launch date

“ Sustaining updates are a very important part of our mission, meaning that we intend to support all platforms for at least as long as our upstream partners (i.e. Intel, AMD and our BIOS vendor Insyde) provide updates for the platforms.

In light of this we have set up a dedicated sustainment team with our Manufacturing partner to make sure that existing platforms receive the necessary attention and updates and are not deprioritized by newer releases.”

Is the response I got from FW support when I asked

So it’s not remotely guaranteed, too many moving parts not under FW control so they will not legally oblige themselves to any hard standard

@Destroya

We’d love to provide a specific length of time we can commit to for ongoing BIOS updates for each generation, but we’re dependent on the support lifetimes of our upstream silicon vendors who in some cases haven’t shared public end of support dates. Instead, we can state that our intent is to provide security updates for at least as long as our silicon vendors are able to.

You can see the above also as FW’s statement regarding support.

[BusyBoredom]

Adding to Ghost’s reply – historically, the bios of most models simply hasnt been supported. My 12th gen still hasnt gotten a stable update on linux, and its been vulnerable for nearly 2 years now.

So while the laptops and the mission are amazing, please don’t go into the purchase expecting bios support. Hopefully it improves in the future, but the reality right now is that your bios will probably be unsupported after launch.

[Nils]

@BusyBoredom

historically, the bios of most models simply hasnt been supported.

If you include the 11th gen in history, the picture is a little better: they made it to 3.17 before the wheels came off their update process. As of May 6 there is actually an update to the status of 3.19: on Framework Laptop BIOS and Driver Releases (11th Gen Intel® Core™) : the EFI Shell Update is now listed as “in development” rather than “coming soon”.