The Foronics website recently discovered a new open source project from Intel for Linux version 5.17 that allows the firmware firmware to update the device without having to restart the system. This new feature, called PFRUT or Platform Firmware Runtime and Telemetry Drivers, will be very useful for servers that pose a major threat to businesses in order to keep the firmware up to date for even a moment.
Therefore, server administrators can easily and worry-free update the system BIOS while ensuring that critical workloads are not lost during the upgrade period. Foronix notes that this feature will be an exclusive feature for servers at this time, and has made no mention of whether home users of Linux distributions will also benefit from this feature.
PFRUT should be very similar to the current way of updating the BIOS via Windows or Linux, except that in the reboot phase to move to the BIOS environment and apply the update, all these steps are performed in the operating system mode and instead of Windows or Linux only Transfer of the update package and prepare the BIOS for its delivery and implementation, the responsibility for carrying out the entire update process will be on the operating system.
It is not yet clear what specific hardware requirements there are for this new mechanism. It is likely that only certain motherboards will support this method, but if there is no hardware dependency, the PFRUT driver will be the only prerequisite. Development of this feature is currently underway with the release of two new driver updates and BIOS Updates tool for PFRUT. Intel has also added these drivers to the “Linux-next” branch, which is scheduled for the next Linux kernel update, or version 5.17 of Linux.
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PFRUT will be part of the ACPI motherboard, which means that Windows and PCs will also be able to upgrade their BIOS or UEFI firmware without having to restart the system, but it remains to be seen whether this feature will work on PCs and Windows as well. Will enter or not.
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