Linux desktop experience has gotten immensely better these days.

However, it still is a bit of dark art at times. Updating the firmware of ASRock Challenger A380 GPU:

Checkout Intel Graphics System Firmware Update Library (gscs) from github, build it, download bunch of update binaries and then:

sudo ./builddir/src/igsc fw update --device /dev/mei1 --image fw/dg2_gfx_fwupdate_SOC2.bin
sudo ./builddir/src/igsc oprom-data update --device /dev/mei1 --image fw/dg2_d_asrock_challenger-a380_oprom-data.rom
sudo ./builddir/src/igsc oprom-code update --device /dev/mei1 --image fw/dg2_d_oprom_asr380.rom
sudo ./builddir/src/igsc fw-data update --device /dev/mei1 --image fw/fwdata/dg2_asrock_challenger-a380_config-data.bin

It all went swimmingly. But I still didn't have full 8GB memory in BAR2:

2026-04-01T07:28:21.163703+00:00 asus kernel: i915 0000:0c:00.0: [drm] Failed to resize BAR2 to 8192M (-ENOSPC)
2026-04-01T07:28:21.163703+00:00 asus kernel: i915 0000:0c:00.0: [drm] Using a reduced BAR size of 256MiB. Consider enabling 'Resizable BAR' or similar, if available in the BIOS.

This turned out to be due to the install being so old that it was MBR partitioned, and thus I was using the Compatibility Support Module (CSM). One side effect of using CSM is that it prevents Resizable BAR from working.

No problem, boot from debian testing liveusb, resize system partition smaller, convert the drive to GPT and add the EFI System Partition and now everything is functional:

Region 2: Memory at 7c00000000 (64-bit, prefetchable) [size=8G]

2026 might still be the Year of the Linux Desktop!