The Meteoric Rise Of Fwupd+LVFS For Linux Firmware Updates

[hughsie]

How do you report stale firmware to fwupd?

Can you file it here https://github.com/fwupd/missing-firmware-dell/issues and I'll make sure the right people reply.

[tomtomme]

Whats the y-axis?

[hughsie]

Whats the y-axis?

Firmware downloads we know about. We also can't count people who mirror the LVFS locally, either for bandwidth reasons or for when local machines don't have Internet access. There are also more numbers you might find interesting here: https://www.fwupd.org/lvfs/metrics

[Guest]

I'm looking for laptop for work and LVFS support is one of the required criteria for it. Unfortunately seeing lots of big names on the slide (in the article) doesn't mean that their recent devices are supported right now, or even planned to. HP -- few workstations, no laptops at all; System76 -- evaluating; Acer, MSI -- no info on devices; no ASUS, and so on.

So right now I have to choose between Dell and Lenovo. But I have something to choose between and this is good.

LVFS is wonderful. I saw presentation from some other conference by Richard Hughes himself and he talked that this cross-vendor update service opens some other interesting opportunities. They can see what hardware components each package updates and if one vendor releases update for some common HW they can notify other vendors that such update exists.

I have a ThinkPad X1 Carbon, and it gets UEFI (and some other firmware) updates through LVFS. Works well. The only problem I faced was the UEFI forgetting my boot entries afterwards, so I just had GRUB call it's EFI executable bootx64.efi and all was well.

[Guest]

Whats the y-axis?

I'm guessing it's the current number of companies/brands serving firmware over LVFS.

[lucrus]

Hmm, strange, I was almost sure nVidia...

[lucrus]

I'm guessing it's the current number of companies/brands serving firmware over LVFS.

I suspect it's more like number of uploads or downloads per month, otherwise I'd have hard time in explaining spikes.

[Syfer]

Please use their suggested method from here https://fwupd.org/lvfs/devices/ :

If your device is listed but missing a firmware update that you see on the vendor website, please file an issue against the LVFS website.

Thank you for the link, I reported my laptop on Github

[starshipeleven]

Hmm, strange, I was almost sure nVidia...

What for

[starshipeleven]

Sorry if this sounds like a dumb question, but does AMD make anything that's not updated at runtime by the kernel?

Dedicated GPUs. They have a vBIOS that currently is updated manually with its own Windows application. Sometimes it's buggy and needs to be updated.

Not a huge thing, but matters also for normal people, not just the BIOS modders that tweak stuff (voltages/frequencies/fan profile).