Donating 5 minutes of your time to help the LVFS

For about every 250 bug reports I recieve I get an email offering to help. Most of the time the person offering help isn’t capable of diving right in the trickiest parts of the code and just wanted to make my life easier. Now I have a task that almost anyone can help with…

For the next version of the LVFS we deploy we’re going to be showing what was changed between each firmware version. Rather than just stating the firmware has changed from SHA1:DEAD to SHA1:BEEF and some high level update description provided by the vendor, we can show the interested user the UEFI modules that changed. I’m still working on the feature and without more data it’s kinda, well, dull. Before I can make the feature actually useful to anyone except a BIOS engineer, I need some help finding out information about the various modules.

In most cases it’s simply googling the name of the module and writing 1-2 lines of a summary about the module. In some cases the module isn’t documented at all, and that’s fine — I can go back to the vendors and ask them for more details about the few we can’t do ourselves. What I can’t do is ask them to explain all 150 modules in a specific firmware release, and I don’t scale to ~2000 Google queries. With the help of EDK2 I’ve already done 213 myself but now I’ve run out of puff.

So, if you have a spare 5 minutes I’d really appreciate some help. The shared spreadsheet is here, and any input is useful. Thanks!

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hughsie

Richard has over 10 years of experience developing open source software. He is the maintainer of GNOME Software, PackageKit, GNOME Packagekit, GNOME Power Manager, GNOME Color Manager, colord, and UPower and also contributes to many other projects and opensource standards. Richard has three main areas of interest on the free desktop, color management, package management, and power management. Richard graduated a few years ago from the University of Surrey with a Masters in Electronics Engineering. He now works for Red Hat in the desktop group, and also manages a company selling open source calibration equipment. Richard's outside interests include taking photos and eating good food.

3 thoughts on “Donating 5 minutes of your time to help the LVFS”

  1. Hello, I was just looking into how to help you as i have time on my hands. I have limited Linux knowledge so don’ know if i can help you but if you would like someone to do some backroom metadata collection for you please let me know. Saw the post on Diaspora…

    1. Sorry, I had a look and realised my Linux knowledge isn’t limited – it’s totally outdated. And wouldn’t want to waste your time ask to explain what’s what.. Apologises – used to do meta data inputting for SQL databases so thought I might be able to help. Caragh

  2. I’ve been super excited about the LVFS (Linux Vendor Firmware Service) knowledge. Up until recently Dell was the only major OEM to extensively support . How can i help you sir?

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