As some of you may know, I’ve spent the last couple of months talking with various Red Hat partners and other OpenHardware vendors that produce firmware updates. These include most of the laptop vendors that you know and love, along with a few more companies making very specialized hardware.
We’ve now got a process, fwupd, that is capable of taking the packaged update and applying it to the hardware using various forms of upload mechanism. We’ve got a specification, AppStream, which is used to describe the updates and provide metadata for what firmware updates are available to be installed. What we were missing was to “close the circle” and provide a web service for small and medium size vendors to use to upload new firmware and make it available to Linux users.
Microsoft already provides such a thing for vendors to use, and it’s part of the Microsoft Update service. From the vendors I’ve talked to, the majority don’t want to run any tools on their firmware to generate metadata. Most of them don’t even want to commit to hosting the metadata or firmware files in the same place forever, and with a couple of exceptions actually like the Microsoft Update model.
I’ve created a simple web service that’s being called Linux Vendor Firmware Service (perhaps not the final name). You can see the site in action here, although it’s not terribly useful or exciting if you’re not a hardware vendor.
If you are vendor that produces firmware and want an access key for the beta site, please let me know. All firmware uploaded will be transferred to the final site, although I’m still waiting to hear back from Red Hat legal about a longer version of the redistribution agreement.
Anyway, comments very welcome, thanks.
Excellent Richard!!
thanks for sharing this with us! really useful!
This is great news. I’m sure you will also add some sort of integrity verification process to these firmware images, like we do for our packages.
The key signing authority could be the fwupd (that’s whom I’d prefer) project, or maybe the fw vendors.