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

[muncrief]

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.

I have an ASUS TUF Gaming X570 Plus. It's a great motherboard, but it's lacking a major UEFI feature I regularly used on my old Gigabyte MB - the ability to select the primary GPU slot.

If you don't use VMs it's probably not an issue, but I have a Windows VM and used to be able to easily swap my x16 slot GPU when I wanted to game on Windows. But with the ASUS I have to alternately use "video=efifbff" in the grub command line and its a major pain.

Like I said though, other than that it's a great motherboard. I just wanted to let you know in case it's an important feature for you.

EDIT: It's supposed to be a colon followed by "off" after "efifb" but I couldn't stop the editor from turning it into a smiley face. It must be some kind of ridiculous mark down thing. Just another example of why I hate mark down! It takes the simplest of things and makes them difficult for no reason.

[R41N3R]

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.

Purism cannot use fwupd as it requires UEFI capsule as far as I know. First I think there needs to be support for flashrom in fwupd, but I might me wrong.

[andre30correia]

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.

using one desktop with asus board and two asus laptop, everything work very well

[rene]

I recently learned the hard way that Asus is blocking flashing an old, previous BIOS in their official firmware. That is rather customer freedom limiting, and rather waste of time if the new BIOS is worse, e.g. worse memory timing or other AGESA glitches. All vendors should be force to allow users to load any version they want, this is really a waste of time for everyone. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6OpVbLKPQQ

[ms178]

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.

AGESA quirks like the one you describe here were one of a bunch of reasons for me to change the platform to something more stable. Let's wait and see if the Crosshair VI Hero which I bought for my father will get a BIOS update for Zen 3 support, after all pictures surfaced during the last couple of days which showed Zen 3 running on a X370 of Gigabyte and a A320 board of Asrock.

[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…

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.