Intel Making It Easier To Flash Ethernet Device Firmware On Linux

For those using the Intel ICE Linux network driver that is used for the likes of the E800 series, it's now going to be easier updating the device firmware from Linux.

A PLDM firmware update library is being introduced with Linux 5.9 to support hardware flashing the firmware using the devlink flash command. ICE firmware updates are using the PLDM file format. PLDM is the Platform Level Data Model firmware update specification developed by the DMTF industry consortium.

This standard has been around since 2016 but with the Intel ICE driver usage appears to be the first time any mainline Linux code is using it as such a new library is being introduced for parsing PLDM files. Plus the Linux 5.9 kernel brings the various ICE driver specific bits for dealing the firmware flashing/upgrade process.

Adding the firmware flashing support for the Intel ICE Ethernet driver is around three thousand lines of code, due in part to the generic PLDM library bits being added to the tree.

More details on this PLDM firmware updating support for Intel Ethernet hardware on the Linux ICE driver can be found via this commit.