LVFS Has Supplied More Than 100 Million Firmware Updates To Linux Users

The Red Hat engineers responsible for creating the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) are celebrating tonight with LVFS paired with the Fwupd Linux firmware updating utility now having served more than 100 million firmware updates!

It was just about one and a half years ago that LVFS served 52 million downloads and now has crossed the 100 million threshold! Or in December 2021 was when LVFS served up its 40 millionth download -- +60 million in just two years. It was in early 2019 when at the time it seemed impressive serving 5 million firmware files.

FWUPD/LVFS has made it remarkably easy to update a lot of system firmware and device/peripheral firmware under Linux. Prior to widespread LVFS support it was often a daunting chore for Linux users to update device firmware with frequently needing to boot into a Microsoft Windows installation, resorting to FreeDOS for system BIOS updates in the olden days, or go without updating firmware.

Fwupd/LVFS lead developer Richard Hughes of Red Hat wrote on his blog:

"As the number of devices supported by the LVFS goes up and up every week, and I’m glad that the community around fwupd is growing at the same pace as the popularity. Google and Collabora have also been amazing partners in encouraging and helping vendors to ship updates on the LVFS and supporting fwupd in ChromeOS — and their trust and support has been invaluable. I’m also glad the “side-projects” like “GNOME Firmware“, “Host Security ID“, “fwupd friendly firmware” and “uSWID as a SBoM format” also seem to be flourishing into independent projects in their own right."

More details on Richard's blog for this monumental milestone.