From Fedora Project Wiki


System Firmware Updates

Summary

This change is to add the ability to perform firmware updates on UEFI machines.

Owner

Current status

  • Targeted release: Fedora 23
  • Last updated: 2015-06-03
  • Tracker bug: <will be assigned by the Wrangler>

(It's actually pretty much finished, but the tracking bug doesn't exist to say that yet.)

Detailed Description

This adds the ability to perform updates of system firmware, as well as some peripheral firmware, on machines supporting the UEFI Capsule Update mechanism and UEFI 2.5's "ESRT" feature.

Right now this is generic support—the number of machines for which we actually have firmware updates available is very small, as the underlying technology is quite new—and it doesn't include any actual delivery mechanism for such firmware images. But if they're put at the right place for fwupd to notice them, and the system supports the right features, they'll show up as updates in gnome-software.

Benefit to Fedora

This allows us to introduce firmware updates for specific machines in the future. Firmware updates are good.


Scope

  • Proposal owners: Get fwupdate, fwupd, and a version of gnome-software that can use them into Fedora, maintain it in the future, etc.
  • Other developers: N/A (not a System Wide Change)
  • Release engineering: N/A (not a System Wide Change)
  • Policies and guidelines: N/A (not a System Wide Change)
  • Trademark approval: N/A (not needed for this Change)

Upgrade/compatibility impact

N/A (not a System Wide Change)

How To Test

N/A (not a System Wide Change)

User Experience

N/A (not a System Wide Change)

Dependencies

This depends on a re-factoring of efibootmgr and efivar-libs, as efibootmgr currently contains a lot of non-library functionality that fwupdate relies on.

N/A (not a System Wide Change)

Contingency Plan

  • Contingency mechanism: (What to do? Who will do it?) Don't ship it.
  • Contingency deadline: N/A (not a System Wide Change)
  • Blocks release? N/A (not a System Wide Change), No
  • Blocks product? none

Documentation

TBD

N/A (not a System Wide Change)

Release Notes

TBD