Dell Will Begin Making Their UEFI Firmware Easy To Update From Linux

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Dell Will Begin Making Their UEFI Firmware Easy To Update From Linux

Richard Hughes has shared that Dell is the first major PC vendor they can now talk about as joining the the Linux Vendor Firmware Service for making it easy to update the UEFI firmware on new systems from the Linux desktop...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Dell-Doing-UEFI-LVFS

[darkbasic]

Useless if they ship broken firmwares: https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=105251

[FireBurn]

I wonder if that'll include their alienware line too

[bug77]

Meh, my new Z170 board can update the UEFI without using the OS at all. Just go into UEFI and download (and apply) updates from there.
So Dell's a little late to the party.

[johanb]

Meh, my new Z170 board can update the UEFI without using the OS at all. Just go into UEFI and download (and apply) updates from there.
So Dell's a little late to the party.

Same here also on a Z170 motherboard, but there's more to the story.

For me it couldn't even connect to internet, since i guess that the motherboard would have its own drivers for ethernet i'm guessing that it had dhcp problems.

Secondly, after using the classic route of downloading the update from linux and putting it on a USB drive and successfully doing the update, it removed the Arch UEFI boot entry so i had go get my live usb to fix that. Thanks ASUS.

That is far from user-friendly in my opinion.

[plonoma]

Will this Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) make it possible for distributions to support making backups/restore points/keeping firmware changelog and backup firmware binary files?
Having firmware restore capabilities would be very useful. Even more if firmware could be restored from within distributions using distribution supplied programs that work for all kinds of firmware.

[bug77]

Same here also on a Z170 motherboard, but there's more to the story.

For me it couldn't even connect to internet, since i guess that the motherboard would have its own drivers for ethernet i'm guessing that it had dhcp problems.

Secondly, after using the classic route of downloading the update from linux and putting it on a USB drive and successfully doing the update, it removed the Arch UEFI boot entry so i had go get my live usb to fix that. Thanks ASUS.

That is far from user-friendly in my opinion.

Sounds like you have PPPoE connection that needs authentication. It would be nice if UEFI would offer a dialog to enter credential, but I'm not sure if it's feasible to do so.
As for your second problem, it sounds like a botched update from Asus, not a problem with updating from UEFI.

Regardless, my point was that Dell is starting to offer updates from Linux when the industry is moving away from updates from within the OS. The implementation may not be the best yet, but things are certainly going that way.

[ChristianSchaller]

Regardless, my point was that Dell is starting to offer updates from Linux when the industry is moving away from updates from within the OS. The implementation may not be the best yet, but things are certainly going that way.

Well your point is based on misunderstanding what is happening here. All the changes you see are based on vendors adopting UEFI 2.5, which introduces a standardized way for doing firmware updates, including ones initiated from inside UEFI itself. However the expected more common way of doing it will be OS initiated, which is the one that Dell now supports for Linux through this collaboration with Richard Hughes and GNOME Software. You see the method introduced by GNOME Software here is basically taking the downloaded firmware and just telling UEFI where to find it, but from that point on it hands the actual update process over to the UEFI firmware itself who does the actual firmware update.

The major advantage this provides over in-UEFI initiated updates is that your system can notify you of new updates being available and you can rely on all the networking features of your operating system to download the updates.

[bug77]

Well your point is based on misunderstanding what is happening here. All the changes you see are based on vendors adopting UEFI 2.5, which introduces a standardized way for doing firmware updates, including ones initiated from inside UEFI itself. However the expected more common way of doing it will be OS initiated, which is the one that Dell now supports for Linux through this collaboration with Richard Hughes and GNOME Software. You see the method introduced by GNOME Software here is basically taking the downloaded firmware and just telling UEFI where to find it, but from that point on it hands the actual update process over to the UEFI firmware itself who does the actual firmware update.

The major advantage this provides over in-UEFI initiated updates is that your system can notify you of new updates being available and you can rely on all the networking features of your operating system to download the updates.

After years of being restricted by Windows-only update software, I'm not too excited about continuing to rely on the OS for updates .(I understand that previously we needed vendor specific software and now the functionality will be provided by the OS itself, but if Windows and OS X won't join the party, this initiative will be dead in the water.