Richard Hughes, creator of the PackageKit project and actively involved in GNOME development, has presented the release of the fwupd package 1.8.0, which offers a background process for organizing firmware updates and the fwupdmgr utility for managing firmware, checking for new versions, and downloading firmware. The project 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 the milestone of 50 million firmware updates delivered to users.
The project provides OEM manufacturers and firmware developers with a service to upload firmware to a specialized centralized catalog called 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) 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 applied when publishing firmware for Windows.
Fwupd supports both automatic firmware update mode, requiring no user actions, and performing operations after 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 are also 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, tablets, servere and Internet of Things devices.
În noua versiune:
- A new attribute for CPUs supported in the HSI (Host Security ID) firmware protection mechanism has been added.
- The libfwupdplugin has added parsers for coSWID and uSWID identifiers, providing initial support for SBoM (Firmware Software Bill of Materials) for firmware verification.
- New HSI attributes have been added for the AMD platform support components (AMD PSP).
- A definition for fwupd-efi version (org.freedesktop.fwupd-efi) has been added.
- The command ‘fwupdmgr install’ now allows specifying a desired firmware version for installation.
- A feature for restarting the BMC (Baseboard Management Controller) after firmware update installation has been implemented.
Sursa: opennet.ro
