ModemManager 1.10 Released With New Functionality For Fwupd, New Modem Support

ModemManager is the FreeDesktop.org project for controlling mobile broadband devices/connections that is akin to NetworkManager for networking. Last week ModemManager 1.10 was quietly outed as the latest feature release.

The ModemManager 1.10 release features improvements for fwupd integration, support for parallel enable/disable calls to the modem interface, support for exposing the network Protocol COnfiguration Options (PCO), allowing to configure the initial LTE default bearer settings, LTE Tracking Area Code (TAC) in 3GPP location information, support for injecting assistance data into the GNSS engine, fixes and improvements to voice call management, new MBIM features, the Dell plug-in now supports XMM-based devices and the DW5821e, and other new modem support.

As part of the quest towards Fwupd firmware updating of mobile broadband devices, there is now a device inhibition interface. When a device is placed under this inhibition state, ModemManager will not use the device until that request has been released. This is necessary so fwupd can handle the firmware updating process without ModemManager trying to interfere and can also be accessed via mmcli with the --inhibit and --inhibit-device arguments. Also for fwupd support there is support for reporting firmware update support properties.

The complete list of ModemManager 1.10 changes can be found via this Git commit. More details on ModemManager can be found via FreeDesktop.org.