Who Writes Dell BIOS Software?

Ok so I'm arguing with a Tech Support Agent on Chat about this....

Does Dell write their own BIOS software?

...ie: the Studio 1749 has a new BIOS A08 update on 3/30/11....I'm trying to find out what it modifies/fixes...

The Tech Support agent says they don't know because the BIOS update is not from dell but from a third party vendor....

Maybe I'm just not understanding this but what this guys is telling me sounds bogus....

 

ok so here is what the supervisor had to say

this does not make any sense to me i mean you can not install the bios for just any model....

 

In any case, most tech support I've dealt with knows far less than I do. Every conversation I have with a support representative begins with me telling them the desired result FIRST, then I go into what is wrong and allow them to go through their troubleshooting script. This has always worked well for me.

 

they have monkeys chained to typewriters writing BIOSs

 

The changes made in the BIOS are in the release notes on the same page where you download the update.

That said, that person was full of crap.

 

that is the problem there are no release notes...that is why i was trying to ask dell tech support and they were trying to tell me dell does not know what it changes because its third-party software....

 

The support reps you talk to probably don't have access to any more details than what you can find out yourself on the web site. And, since the reps are rated on how many calls they can handle in a given amount of time, they may not bother checking the web site for you.

Dell systems use several different families of BIOS, depending mostly on what product area (home portables, office desktops, servers) and development path was chosen when the system was created.

Some Dell products are "badge engineered", where Dell simply puts a Dell badge on them and a Dell logo in the boot screen. For example, the Poweredge 350 was a badge-engineered Intel ISP-something-or-other.

Some Dell products are customizations of a stock design from another manufacturer, and some are from-scratch designs.

In each of these cases, the systems could have been developed with a BIOS originally from Phoenix / Award / AMI / InSyde. The contract manufacturer then customizes a generic BIOS for the particular system. Depending on the state of confidential agreements between the manufacturer and Dell, either the manufacturer will continue to support the BIOS, the whole thing is turned over to Dell for support, or some combination of the two.

In any event, all of this happens in product engineering groups far away from the support people you talk to on the phone. I don't believe there are official channels for a support person to ask the engineering group this sort of question, though if they were determined enough they probably could get some sort of unofficial answer.

Having said all that, a BIOS problem can be in one of 3 major areas:

1) The piece which is supplied by the BIOS manufacturer (Phoenix, etc.). This part of the BIOS is common to every BIOS built from that particular set of code. It is unlikely that anything will get fixed in there (see footnote).

2) The piece which is customized by the manufacturer for the specific hardware. This piece may be common to a number of different systems sold by different companies (Dell, Acer, etc.). Getting something fixed in there would require going back to the manufacturer, who would probably want to test that the fix for Dell wouldn't break anything in the code that was used on other products. Not impossible, but a rather hard sell.

3) The piece which is specific to this one Dell model. If Dell has responsibility for that area, they can fix it in-house. If the agreement is the manufacturer has responsibility, Dell will have to pay to have the change implemented. Since the change won't affect any other products, it does not need to go through extensive testing to make sure it won't break anything else. Most of the customizations in this part are for things like disabling menu options Dell doesn't want you to see, updating the video BIOS, and so on.

Footnote: Many of the older licenses for a BIOS design were negotiated before there were so many different PC models, and overall sales of PCs were a lot smaller. It wasn't uncommon to sign a license which allowed for use of the BIOS on an unlimited number of models and shipments by the licensee. Some computer manufacturers have been dragging this old code along for years now (you may see something like "Award Modular BIOS Copyright (C) 1995" on a much newer system. That's because the manufacturer doesn't have to pay anything to use it - they paid a one-time fee and that was that. Going back and asking for something to be changed in there would result in the BIOS writer wanting to negotiate a new license on a royalty basis. No system manufacturer is going to agree to that.