FWUPD Is Being Ported To The BSDs To Handle Firmware Updating

With the incredible success of FWUPD and the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) where most major hardware vendors are supporting it in some capacity for distributing firmware updates to Linux customers, there are BSD developers working to it port it over to their camp to support firmware updates.

3MDEB under funding from NLNet is working to bring FWUPD to the BSDs. This is being done since firmware updates are commonly done in the name of security these days, among other factors. 3MDEB is working to see their port of FWUPD work on at least FreeBSD, DragonflyBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD. The initial focus at least will be handling firmware updates for USB devices and UEFI capsule updates.

FreeBSD is the preliminary target for their development work. It isn't trivial porting FWUPD to the BSDs with some dependencies like around libusb/libgsub requiring additional work, device manager differences, no systemd, no EFI ESRT on FreeBSD, etc.

Anyhow for those interested in the ongoing port of FWUPD to the BSDs can see this slide deck by 3MDEB's Norbert Kamiński who presented today at FOSDEM Online 2021 around this notable effort.