Acer Begins Publishing UEFI Firmware Updates For Linux Users On LVFS For Fwupd

[amdtesterman]

i think everyone can update through the bios, that's not something to be proud of. user has only one model so it is either his model supports lvfs and he can have nice things or his model doesn't support lvfs and he can't have nice things, or at least not yet

it is not true, for example, the acer laptop I had .. or other examples, lenovos.. all of them must be updated through windows, there is no way to do on linux. acer and lenovo, both of them ahm.
and not all the lenovos are supported by lvfs, 10 percent either XD

[blackiwid]

you can't do that, why are you interested in non-relevant questions? and btw "if you can send updates to every machine very often and automatically without the user making even a decision about it" then who cares whether this botnet is opensource or not?

Because people can audit the sourcecode of opensource / free software and it's much harder to sneak in stuff there than adding backdoors and rootkits and other stuff to proprietary blobs, obviously...

[marlock]

but if you can send updates to every machine very often and automatically without the user making even a decision about it, is that then still true?

AFAIK this isn't the case.

LVFS+fwupd (at least as implemented by Ubuntu Software Center and by the new GNOME settings module produced by System76) are detecting firmware updates and letting the user choose to apply these just like they do for any other software update (not mixed in the same list with the rest, in a specific section of the UI, but the same logic).

So it can be applied automatically if some distro decides to do it that way, but it can work as Linux users usually expect any update to work, and the latter is the known common implementation, so we need not fret about remote uninspectable code being automatically applied to the most priviledged execution levels possible (that wouldn't be a solution but instead a big problem with FSF, allowing shady practices like remotely killing or hobling older devices to force users to update, stuff that is unfortunately common in other hardware like IoT and smart-whatever)

t is not true, for example, the acer laptop I had .. or other examples, lenovos.. all of them must be updated through windows, there is no way to do on linux. acer and lenovo, both of them ahm.
and not all the lenovos are supported by lvfs, 10 percent either XD

I'm a bit shocked that a manufacturer would cut that feature out of UEFI and demand windows software to do the work instead. LVFS coverage being mere 10% is a "new thing, work in progress, glad it already has 10%" thing, because it started from nothing, whereas a mobo not supporting firmware update directly via UEFI/BIOS is kind of unexcusable IMHO.

[ThoreauHD]

What's wrong with Apple?

I have a 2014 MBP running Linux now; laptop is still supported enough by Apple to have a BIOS date of July this year (which came from Catalina beta; the latest one from Mojave is just a month earlier). Firmware mostly works fine too (have some weird BAR resource allocation issue with Thunderbolt hotplug on Linux; works fine on macOS though).

What other mainstream laptop is still getting BIOS updates of any sort after 5 years?

Getting served a helping of broken shit for 5 years is what I'd call of bonus. But you do you.