Submit firmware to "Linux Vendor Firmware Service" (LVFS) for easy updating

[rugk]

Maybe some Linux users do not yet know the Linux Vendor Firmware Service. However, it’s a great combined effort (as per this whitepaper also on the freedesktop.org site) to be able to update flashable devices in your devices, without having to boot Windows/Mac OS or so.

Well… in any case, what maters is that you get firmware updates on many Linux distros. Here e.g. with GNOME (thus it could also look like this in PureOS):

Or KDE:

More information for end users are here. (screenshots also taken from there)

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To get to the technical details, this whole thing depends on Purism. And, good news, actually they are already included in the vendor list on the site!
Bad news: They have not yet submitted any firmware updates there (last red column) and their statement there says:

Testing is in progress, hopefully done soon! 2017-08-15

So this statement is heavily outdated and you did not follow it by facts. So it would be great to hear the current state of this topic, and whether/when (hopefully the latter) you will upload firmware there.

Even major other vendors like Dell are better at this and regularly upload firmware there. So I would have expected that a Linux-specific vendor as you is at the top of that, too.

[rugk]

Ugh, also saw an old thread that has received no reply about this topic:

LVFS support for librem laptops?

Dear purism staff, I recently acquired a new Librem 13 and very happy with it I noticed on fwupd.org website that purism had stated that it’s intended to support LVFS for the purism products. Would this LVFS support be used for coreboot upgrades ? This seems like a good use case although I don’t know LVFS well enough to understand whether that’s possible or not… Any feedback on this ? Regards, Nicolas

So, really, Purism should comment on that…

[peterpan]

If you have a look into the wiki, they’re still testing HEADS and don’t have coreboot in a state they wish to.
So maybe there’s a lot of work to be done, before considering an automated process like this?

[rugk]

Don’t even know if the BIOS is the only thing they want to update. But in any case there should be an update method. I mean even if there is work to do, people would otherwise need to flash updates manually, and that is inconvenient.
Also the update can be for “moving to HEADS” or so… don’t know the details and how/whether it is possible, but many other vendors are successful and fwupd includes great things like verifying applied updates after they are flashed and so on.

[henry-nicolas]

I’v no doubt that this level of integration is complex to achieve. However, it would still be nice to get some visibility on what are they plans, roadmap etc…

Just so that we would have a clue about what we can/can’t expect regarding this.

[jeremiah]

Hi everyone! This is definitely something that is active inside Purism. From what I understand we’ve already sent our updates upstream to LVFS and they have received our info. I’m looking into this internally and will post with more info as soon as we have it.

[rugk]

I’v no doubt that this level of integration is complex to achieve.

As far as I read on the site, it is fairly easy, as the whole system already supports a lot of things for flashing, verifying etc.

[anarcat]

Hi everyone! This is definitely something that is active inside Purism. From what I understand we’ve already sent our updates upstream to LVFS and they have received our info. I’m looking into this internally and will post with more info as soon as we have it.

I don’t want to assume bad faith here, but we’ve been hearing this “$something soon” quite a bit from Purism in the past years… First it was a:

Testing is in progress, hopefully done soon! 2017-08-15

on the fwupd.org vendor status page, and now it’s “we sent our updates to LVFS”… If the latter would have happened, we would see something similar to this page, with actual releases and updates…

Can we get another update on this? What’s keeping Purism from shipping coreboot updates the (now) standard way?

Thanks!

[jeremiah]

You’re right to send a reminder, thanks.

We’ve been in touch with upstream numerous times but there remain some details to work out. Frankly other work has come before this since it’s higher priority, but this work is delayed and not abandoned.

[jeremiah]

I’ll be a bit more specific about upstream’s requirements; they want flashrom to be usable from a tool called fwupd (firmware update). flashrom is only one of the packages that Purism contributes too, we modify things like coreboot and heads as well, so there’s lots of development going on and refactoring to using things like libflashrom has been a lower prio. Hopefully I’ll put it on the front burner once a couple issues that I need to resolve are complete.

[taylor-williamc]

If you have not bought yet, you cannot get anything but Evergreen, unless you find a recipient of Chestnut or Dogwood who is willing to sell it to you. Everything up to Evergreen is already claimed.

The newer models will have more refined hardware, with physical tweaks to CPU placement and thermal management. Firmware can’t change that.

[mstdnuser]

Will we ever get UEFI support? Like a tianocore package, that supports heads?

[anarcat]

Hopefully I’ll put it on the front burner once a couple issues that I need to resolve are complete.

Have you thought about Christmas gifts for your users worried about running random shell scripts to update their coreboot images?

(In other words: any progress?)

[jeremiah]

coreboot / utility

Not so random.

[anarcat]

Not so random.

I removed the “random” word, but I think the point remains.

[rugk]

Indeed, a proper system integration is always better than any shell script.

[rugk]

Getting back to the LVFS topic some years later now…

In the meantime here is a thread about the same topic for the Librem 5:

Gnome-firmware-update

https://gitlab.gnome.org/hughsie/gnome-firmware-updater it could be interesting for Librem5?

In general, I don’t see much progress on this topic, however.
It would make updating firmware so much more convenient and even Dell XPS laptops support it, so you should really invest time in this IMHO!

On the LVFS website it still says for Purism:

Testing is in progress, hopefully done soon! 2017-08-15

Has test account on the LVFS

Well… that’s not a lot of progress, is not it?

Especially since this was your last statement on this:

@jeremiah

Frankly other work has come before this since it’s higher priority, but this work is delayed and not abandoned.

@jeremiah

Hopefully I’ll put it on the front burner once a couple issues that I need to resolve are complete.

So, is there any update? This has obviously been requested for quite some time now…
And it would certainly make a great video, be it for the Librem 5 or any other device.

Note they now seem to have a nice dashboard for vendors and even consulting services are offered – should you need these.

[jeremiah]

I’ve been in touch with Hughsie a couple of times (maintainer of LVFS) but it’s never come together. I’ll make another effort beginning next week.

[henry-nicolas]

@jeremiah are there any progresses to report regarding LVFS support for coreboot firmware upgrades?

[rugk]

There has been comments here:

A minor problem with software updates

Didn’t have time to investigate (or know how to do this) but somehow think that fwupd package is something available for the first time within PureOS Byzantium repo. IMO, very good direction and great progress that required (and still do) some expert handling and control from Purism Team side, or at least deserves some attention from users of PureOS. Thank you @jeremiah! Just preparation to get there was a lot of work, wasn’t it? Few selected explanations here (beside another 53): And…

Anyway, in my testing at least for the Librem Mini, nothing is available yet:

sudo fwupdmgr refresh
[sudo] password for admrugk: 
Updating lvfs
Downloading…             [*************************************  ]
Successfully downloaded new metadata: 0 local devices supported