Richard Hughes, the creator of the PackageKit project and an active participant in the development of GNOME, has released version 1.8.0 of the fwupd package. This version offers a background process for managing firmware updates and a utility called fwupdmgr for managing firmware, checking for new versions, and downloading firmware. The project's code is written in C and is distributed under the LGPLv2.1 license. At the same time, it was announced that the LVFS project has reached a milestone of 50 million firmware updates delivered to users.
The project provides OEM manufacturers and firmware developers with a service for uploading firmware to a dedicated centralized catalog, LVFS (Linux Vendor Firmware Service), which can be utilized in Linux distributions using the fwupd toolkit. Currently, the catalog offers firmware for 829 types of devices (over 4000 firmware files) from 120 manufacturers. Using a centralized catalog frees manufacturers from the need to create packages for distributions and allows firmware to be delivered in a '.cab' archive with additional metadata, which is also used when publishing firmware for Windows.
Fwupd supports both an automatic firmware update mode, requiring no action from the user, and an operation that can be executed with user confirmation or request. Fwupd and LVFS are already used in RHEL, Fedora, Ubuntu, SUSE, Debian, and many other distributions for automated firmware updates, and they are supported in the GNOME Software and KDE Discover applications. Moreover, fwupd is not limited to desktop systems and can also be used for updating firmware on smartphones and tablets. servers and Internet of Things devices.
In the new release:
- A new attribute for CPUs supported in the Host Security ID (HSI) firmware protection mechanism has been added.
- Libfwupdplugin now includes parsers for coSWID and uSWID identifiers, providing initial support for SBoM (Firmware Software Bill of Materials) for firmware verification.
- New HSI attributes for AMD platform support components (AMD PSP) have been added.
- The version definition for fwupd-efi (org.freedesktop.fwupd-efi) has been added.
- The 'fwupdmgr install' command now supports the installation of a specified firmware version.
- The capability to restart the Baseboard Management Controller (BMC) after a firmware update installation has been provided.
Source: opennet.ru
