Arch Linux

biaszek

Member

Registered: 2013-02-21

Posts: 2

DELL (E3400) Bios Update libsmbios fails

Hi there,

my first day on Arch and short before midnight I encounter my first serious problem. Well I am happy to report until now everything went quite smooth.

After I set up my system I wanted to try more recent BIOS versions for my DELL E4300 in hope they would cope better with the performance problem when the CPU gets warm. When the CPU get too warm the BIOS reduces the voltage to the CPU so much the systems get almost unusable. This is a known bug for many DELL models. Even appending the option ignore_ppc=1 to the processor module is not helping then.

In Debian I stoped at A22 because after that problems on resume came with A23 and A24.

Well, I come from Debian and there I use libsmbios procedure without any problems. Under Arch the update is beinig written to CMOS without complaints, but on reboot the update mechanism by the BIOS refuses to proceed, saying the image would not be valid. This never happend to me before.

I tried to use the binary from Debian's repo, same effect. So I guess there might be a problem with dell_rbu module shipped by Arch's kernel.

Does anyone have some insights on this?

Thanks in advance,

Biaszek

biaszek

Member

Registered: 2013-02-21

Posts: 2

Re: DELL (E3400) Bios Update libsmbios fails

Well, kind of solved this out by using another way.

I mounted a FDOS developer img and copied the bios update file into it and dit let run via syslinux bootloader.