Udoo team silently introduced a new Bios V1.05. The only documented change is: Enabled SPDIF-OUT pin on Audio Codec More info: https://www.udoo.org/docs-x86/Advanced_Topics/UEFI_update.html Also Udoo introduced support for the EAPI Framework: https://www.udoo.org/docs-x86/Advanced_Topics/EAPI.html EAPI (Embedded Application Programming Interface) is a framework developed by PICMG® for COM Express modules that gives a common API to unify software control for: System information Watchdog timer I2C Bus Flat Panel brightness control User storage area GPIO
BIOS still not open source, updater still limited to selected operating systems. Hard to get excited about it.
Updated being limited in OS is not really an issue as it is relatively trivial to create a bootable DOS USB and run the updates from there.
I'm not clear on this. Where does the DOS come from? It doesn't address that the Udoo makers decided to use a closed, proprietary firmware, instead of an open source one. Then some of these bugs could be addressed by the Udoo community.
That was addressing the comment about the updated only running under certain OS. I was pointing out that anyone who uses an UDOO can easily update the BIOS regardless of what OS is normally used on their UDOO. As to whether an Open Source BIOS should have been used I agree it would be nice but I have no information that would allow me to have a view on how difficult it would be to achieve.
Just download something like Rufus and it has the option to build a bootable DOS USB (based on FreeDOS I believe).
The firmware development team used a solution they implemented in other single-board computers. Shifting to a different solution would have increased the development time and costs of the UDOO X86. There is potentially good news on the horizon for those who seek open-source firmware. We are in communication with the coreboot team and recently received an offer of help from a member of their community, who will be exploring the implementation of their open-source firmware onto the UDOO X86.
Why not use OpenFirmware? It is BSD-licensed, unlike coreboot. It worked well enough for OLPC and Apple's Old World and New World macs, so it should handle Udoo's needs. I've compiled the source code for both OS X and Haiku on x86 architecture, so it is quite portable. It's also quite extensible. Beware that some developers have corrupted the original OF code with GPL code, but the original source code is still available.
This contradicts your earlier statement "I was pointing out that anyone who uses an UDOO can easily update the BIOS regardless of what OS is normally used on their UDOO." Now you have reduced that to "all common OS" and moved away from the Udoo board itself. In other words, if the OS I am running on Udoo now doesn't make bootable DOS USB sticks, I have to resort to using a different OS on different hardware. I think we have different ideas of "relatively trivial," and there are too many assumptions about what developers are doing. Udoo needs to make the BIOS updater (and BIOS itself) available in full under a BSD license to maximize inclusiveness.
You can get freedos from freedos.org or msdos from anybootdisk.com. Probably other sources of both of those if you google for sources.
I believe we've already established that Rufus requires Windows, i.e. another operating system. Assuming this can be done with dd, do I have to install FreeBSD or can their installer run the firmware updater?
Ah, missed that. It think you can use dd or use somthing like this (in the answer) https://superuser.com/questions/1285482/persistent-freedos-live-usb
