ASUS Offers First Motherboard Firmware Update Via LVFS+Fwupd For Linux Users

[phoronix]

Phoronix: ASUS Offers First Motherboard Firmware Update Via LVFS+Fwupd For Linux Users

ASUS has been evaluating the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) for distributing firmware updates to their Linux customers for flashing in turn via Fwupd. Their first motherboard firmware update has now been volleyed onto this open-source platform for easing firmware updates on Linux...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=ASUS-LVFS-First-Motherboard

[R41N3R]

Seems like a good step forward. I hope they will not loose all the settings then and that they allow the user to downgrade in case of instabilities and lost functionalities. My Asus Prime X370 Pro mainboard doesn't keep the settings and you have to adjust plenty of settings after the UEFI upgrade manually.

I case of my MSI MPG X570 I've noticed plenty of system crashes after the last upgrade to the new AGESA and I had to downgrade to the old release. Not sure if Asus allows an easy downgrade on all of the mainboards.

[pal666]

i hope this effort will extend to normal atx motherboards

[angrypie]

The only vendors that seem to be using LVFS for real are Lenovo and Dell. Most accounts are "test accounts," even from open-source champions like System76.

[Lanz]

Asus has usually been pretty good with Linux support. I've bought a lot of their hardware over the years for that very reason.

[RSpliet]

Asus has usually been pretty good with Linux support. I've bought a lot of their hardware over the years for that very reason.

Unfortunately that Linux support is not so much thanks to Asus; driver contributions for their hardware are largely carried by either the community or third-parties. That being said, you're quite right that a lot of their hardware tends to work well on Linux. I welcome this LVFS UEFI distribution as a step in the right direction, and hope they'll follow through with more motherboards in the foreseeable future.

[vhaarr]

I was considering two motherboards for my next build; Gigabyte and ASUS.

This tips the scale for me - just the fact that they're pushing anything through fwupd. I'll probably get an ASUS GPU as well, just because of this.

[johanb]

Interesting vendor list.

So the laptop makers worthy to support seem to be Lenovo, Dell and Star Labs.
Surprised to not see Purism having uploaded anything, I doubt that they have no components in their hardware that don't need firmware upgrades (or maybe they consider them to be proprietary blobs?).
If I remember correctly System76 doesn't upload anything because they have their own firmware update tool, not sure how that's going for them though.

[schmidtbag]

Asus has usually been pretty good with Linux support. I've bought a lot of their hardware over the years for that very reason.

Huh? Asus' Linux support is possibly one of the worst, especially when it comes to laptops. They tend to use popular chipsets, which makes the out-of-box experience smooth, but they also have a lot of platforms that are totally unsupported by Linux and take a lot (too much) work to get yourself up and running. Meanwhile, most of the advanced features you're paying extra for (because Asus' high-end products are disproportionately expensive) are Windows-only.

I don't necessarily know of a manufacturer that is more supportive of Linux, but I'd rather pay less for a board that can accomplish the exact same things in a Linux perspective.

[Girolamo_Cavazzoni]

My Thinkpad A285 got a firmware update recently via LVFS. This model came out a good while before Lenovo announced its participation in the LVFS. To me it’s clear which Laptop vendor I’ll suggest when someone asks…