[Beowulf] Repenting for sins against Dell (on good Friday, no less)

[Mark Hahn]

> easier (DKMS). Upgrading a BIOS version from a Linux shell is not
> something you want to give up after you tried it.

if a vendor wanted to do a good job, I think that opening/documenting
the bios would be a huge win.  for instance, giving us a way to poke
(or at least peek) the actual bios settings in flash would be incredibly
valuable.  I expect that supporting flash from linux would be pretty
simple - a small kernel driver to abstract from the flash size/type
and its particular controller.  IMO, this is clearly in the vendor's
court because they're the ones who know/control the hardware details.

HP distributes linux-based firmware updates, but only for add-in devices
(scsi controllers, BMC, etc), not the bios itself...