3 Million Firmware Files and Counting…

In the last two years the LVFS has supplied over 3 million firmware files to end users. We now have about a two dozen companies uploading firmware, of which 9 are multi-billion dollar companies.

Every month about 200,000 more devices get upgraded and from the reports so far the number of failed updates is less than 0.01% averaged over all firmware types. The number of downloads is going up month-on-month, although we’re no longer growing exponentially, thank goodness. The server load average is 0.18, and we’ve made two changes recently to scale even more for less money: signing files in a 30 minute cron job rather than immediately, and switching from Amazon to BunnyCDN.

The LVFS is mainly run by just one person (me!) and my time is sponsored by the ever-awesome Red Hat. The hardware costs, which recently included random development tools for testing the dfu and nvme plugins, and the server and bandwidth costs are being paid from charitable donations from the community. We’re even cost positive now, so I’m building up a little pot for the next server or CDN upgrade. By pretty much any metric, the LVFS is a huge success, and I’m super grateful to all the people that helped the project grow.

The LVFS does have one weakness, that it has a bus factor of one. In other words, if I got splattered by a bus, the LVFS would probably cease to exist in the current form. To further grow the project, and to reduce the dependence on me, we’re going to be moving various parts of the LVFS to the Linux Foundation. This means that they’ll be sysadmins who don’t have to google basic server things, a proper community charter, and access to an actual legal team. From a OEM point of view, nothing much should change, including the most important thing that it’ll continue to be free to use for everyone. The existing server and all the content will be migrated to the LVFS infrastructure. From a users point of view, new metadata and firmware will be signed by the Linux Foundation key, rather than my key, although we haven’t decided on a date for the switch-over yet. The LF key has been trusted by fwupd for firmware since 1.0.8 and it’s trivial to backport to older branches if required.

Before anyone gets too excited and starts pointing me at all my existing bugs for my other stuff: I’ll probably still be the person “onboarding” vendors onto the LVFS, and I’m fully expecting to remain the maintainer and core contributor to the lvfs-website code itself — but I certainly should have a bit more time for GNOME Software and color stuff.

In related news, even more vendors are jumping on the LVFS. No more public announcements yet, but hopefully soon. For a lot of hardware companies they’ll be comfortable “going public” when the new hardware currently in development is on shelves in stores. So, please raise a glass to the next 3 million downloads!