I’d like to formally welcome Lenovo to the LVFS. For the last few months myself and Peter Jones have been working with partners of Lenovo and the ThinkPad, ThinkStation and ThinkCenter groups inside Lenovo to get automatic firmware updates working across a huge number of different models of hardware.
Obviously, this is a big deal. Tens of thousands of people are likely to be offered a firmware update in the next few weeks, and hundreds of thousands over the next few months. Understandably we’re not just flipping a switch and opening the floodgates, so if you’ve not seen anything appear in fwupdmgr update or in GNOME Software don’t panic. Over the next couple of weeks we’ll be moving a lot of different models from the various testing and embargoed remotes to the stable remote, and so the list of supported hardware will grow. That said, we’ll only be supporting UEFI hardware produced fairly recently, so there’s no point looking for updates on your beloved T61. I also can’t comment on what other Lenovo branded hardware is going to be supported in the future as I myself don’t know.
Bringing Lenovo to the LVFS has been a lot of work. It needed changes to the low level fwupdate library, fwupd, and even the LVFS admin portal itself for various vendor-defined reasons. We’ve been working in semi-secret for a long time, and I’m sure it’s been frustrating to all involved not being able to speak openly about the grand plan. I do think Lenovo should be applauded for the work done so far due to the enormity of the task, rather than chastised about coming to the party a little late. If anyone from HP is reading this, you’re now officially late.
We’re still debugging a few remaining issues, and also working on making the update metadata better quality, so please don’t judge Lenovo (or me!) too harshly if there are initial niggles with the update process. Updating the firmware is slightly odd in that it sometimes needs to reboot a few times with some scary-sounding beeps, and on some hardware the first UEFI update you do might look less than beautiful. If you want to do the firmware update on Lenovo hardware, you’ll have a lot more success with newer versions of fwupd and fwupdate, although we should do a fairly good job of not offering the update if it’s not going to work. All our testing has been done with a fully updated Fedora 28 workstation. It of course works with SecureBoot turned on, but if you’ve enabled the BootOrder lock manually you’ll need to turn that off first.
I’d like to personally thank all the Lenovo engineers and managers I’ve worked with over the last few months. All my time has been sponsored by Red Hat, and they rightfully deserve love too.
Thank you very much for all the trouble! Keep up the good work.
To the vendors: Please consider supporting LVFS as much as possible.
Thank you very much indeed for all the good you have done around LVFS (and ColorHug :-).
Big deal indeed! Thanks for all the hard work.
Thanks for your work :)
I had a firmware update for my 2017 ThinkPad X1 Carbon show up in Gnome Sodtware a couple of weeks ago. Everything worked like a charm!
Thank you for all the hard work that went into making it such a smooth experience.
And here I was excited whether HP would be next and then I got disappointed. I’d like to get a new HP laptop as I love their hardware, but fwupdate support will be a hard requirement for me now.
Great to hear that, I was starting to wonder if I should move from Lenovo after my P50 and X1 carbon but nice to them in the supported devices.
Which components are going to be supported by fwupd?
For example, for a ThinkPad P50 there are official Windows updaters for UEFI, Intel ME, HDD firmware, SATA and NVMe SSD firmware, Thunderbolt firmware and TPM firmware. Are all of these going to be supported? Any other components?
UEFI is supported now. ME is WIP. I believe TBT is also WIP. I’ve not heard anything about anything storage related, but it’s one of the things I’d like to concentrate next year as it needs a lot of low-level plumbing in all parts of the stack. Lenovo obviously can’t do everything all at once, and I’m pretty happy that they are dedicating resources to this now.
Great news! Nice work all around
This is amazing news! :D
It seems the oldest T4xx Thinkpad currently in the list of supported devices is T460s. You mention more devices will be added over the next few weeks, any chance the T420s and T440s will be among them?
I personally hope so, but I’ve not seen anything yet. Fingers crossed.
Alright, I’ll wait.
Once again, thank you and everybody who worked on this. :)
This is awesome, Thank You!
Super cool. Thanks for doing this and thanks to the people at Lenovo who were willing to coordinate and get this right.
Will they be supporting the Yoga line(900,910,920)?
The X1 Yoga is supported, but I don’t know what other hardware is planned, sorry.
HOPE YOU GUYS WILL SUPPORT ALSO LENOVO YOGA BOOK AS IT IS A UNIQUE DEVICE TO BOOT LINUX ON IT
Thank you very much for such dedication! Hopefully someday the Ideapad line will also be supported.
Just got this message on Gnome Ubuntu 18.04. Rebooted and everything updated seamlessly!
I think most of us classic ThinkPad aficionados would be ok with our beloved T61 not being on the supported list. I’ve got an, uh, unofficial firmware on mine to drop the wifi whitelist, speed up sata, and allow newer processor models, and it would be kind of annoying to have those modifications reverted :)
Looking forwards to not needing to boot Windows (or DOS) to update my work desktop, tho! Good stuff!
Great work!
In 2014 we got Steam and CS:GO
In 2018 finally (comfortable) firmware upgrades
In 2022?
The world…
Oh this is great!
please bring it on the P40.
thank you for the good work.
greetings from germany
Hi
With this machine bought 10 months ago, the wifi is NOT working. I cross my fingers….
[roger@lenovo ~]$ inxi -A -M -n
Machine:
Type: Laptop System: LENOVO product: 80WW v: RESCUER R720-15IKBN
serial:
Mobo: LENOVO model: LNVNB161216 v: SDK0L77769 WIN serial:
UEFI: LENOVO v: 4KCN30WW date: 08/31/2017
Audio:
Card-1: Intel CM238 HD Audio driver: snd_hda_intel
Sound Server: ALSA v: k4.17.12-arch1-1-ARCH
Network:
Card-1: Qualcomm Atheros QCA9377 802.11ac Wireless Network Adapter
driver: ath10k_pci
IF: wlp3s0 state: down mac: 56:ef:0c:67:98:7b
Card-2: Realtek RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet
driver: r8169
IF: enp4s0 state: up speed: 100 Mbps duplex: full mac: 54:e1:ad:8c:29:82
Card-3: Qualcomm Atheros type: USB driver: btusb
IF-ID-1: tun0 state: unknown speed: 10 Mbps duplex: full mac: N/A
I cross my fingers, because this machine, bought 10 months ago cannot use wifi with Linux!
[roger@lenovo ~]$ inxi -A -M -n
Machine:
Type: Laptop System: LENOVO product: 80WW v: RESCUER R720-15IKBN
serial:
Mobo: LENOVO model: LNVNB161216 v: SDK0L77769 WIN serial:
UEFI: LENOVO v: 4KCN30WW date: 08/31/2017
Audio:
Card-1: Intel CM238 HD Audio driver: snd_hda_intel
Sound Server: ALSA v: k4.17.12-arch1-1-ARCH
Network:
Card-1: Qualcomm Atheros QCA9377 802.11ac Wireless Network Adapter
driver: ath10k_pci
IF: wlp3s0 state: down mac: 56:ef:0c:67:98:7b
Card-2: Realtek RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet
driver: r8169
IF: enp4s0 state: up speed: 100 Mbps duplex: full mac: 54:e1:ad:8c:29:82
Card-3: Qualcomm Atheros type: USB driver: btusb
IF-ID-1: tun0 state: unknown speed: 10 Mbps duplex: full mac: N/A
In 2022 you will have no control anymore of your hardware…
That’s excellent news, thank you (and Lenovo) for making this possible!
Looking forward to support for the T470p and the T440s/p series.
I am also working on Lenovo K2 smartphone. I have battery issue on it. But now the issue has been resolved and I am feeling good.
I was literally thinking about some malware trying to trick me into something bad when my Ubuntu@T470 asked me if I want to update my firmware :) Googled what was the case and found out that it is actually a legit update.
Thanks for your work. I never hoped to get this smooth firmware update experience on Linux. This is great!
Awesome news! Thanks, have an addiction to Gnome3 a DE which I once hated (didn’t give a fair try).
“If anyone from HP is reading this, you’re now officially late.”
…Where is the rest of THAT story? ;)
<3'in Gnome
When you say newer versions of fwupd and fwupdate, what exact versions are those? Any idea if they are already available in distributions like Ubuntu?
Will this also work in live CD/DVD environment?
1.0.8 and 1.1.0 is what we’ve been testing with. No idea about Ubuntu. We’ve never tried doing it from a LiveUSB image, so I’d be interested to hear if it would work.
This makes me so happy and it will hopefully drive through even more hardware vendors. Keep them coming! We owe you a thousand times!
Unfortunately I’ve had a little bad luck with it…
fwupdmgr get-devices –verbose
Error calling StartServiceByName for org.freedesktop.fwupd: GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.TimedOut: Failed to activate service ‘org.freedesktop.fwupd’: timed out
It worked perfectly some weeks ago so suppose there must have been a regression somewhere.
Ubuntu Gnome 16.04
fwupdmgr –version
client version: 0.8.3
0.8.x is very old and not really supported anymore. Can you try with something newer?
It’s great to see another significant hardware vendor working with the open-source community, and vice versa. I look forward to being able to update my ThinkPad firmware without leaving Gnome’s GUI.
I tried to find a way to contact Lenovo on their website to ask if they were going to support X260 (the one-model-newer X280 is there), but couldn’t find anywhere to direct the question. :(
I hope they will though. I have no doubt the BIOS etc. in my laptop is probably somewhat dated by now, as it’s never once booted into a Windows system…
Thank you very much for all the trouble! and providing such information. Keep up the good work. To the vendors: Please consider supporting LVFS as much as possible.