fwupd 1.5.2

The last few posts I did about fwupd releases were very popular, so I’ll do the same thing again: I’ve just tagged fwupd 1.5.2 – This release changes a few things:

Add a build time flag to indicate if packages are supported – this would be set for “traditional” package builds done by the distro, and unset by things like the Fedora COPR build, the Flatpak or Snap bundles. There are too many people expecting that the daily snap or flatpak packages represent the “official fwupd” and we wanted to make it clear to people using these snapshots that we’ve done basically no QA on the snapshots.

A plugin for the Pinebook Pro laptop has been added, although it needs further work from PINE64 before it will work correctly. At the moment there’s no way of getting the touchpad version, or finding out which keyboard layout is installed so we can tag the correct firmware file. It’s nearly there and is still very useful for playing with the hardware on the PB Pro.

Components can now set the icon from the metadata from the LVFS, if supported by the fwupd plugin. This allows us to tag “generic” ESRT devices as things like EC devices, or, ahem, batteries.

I’ve been asked by a few teams, including the Red Hat Edge team, the CoreOS team and also by Google to switch from libsoup to libcurl for downloading data – as this reduces the image size by over 5MB. Even NetworkManager depends on libcurl now, and this seemed like a sensible thing to do given fwupd is now being used in so many different places.

Fall back to FAT32 internal partitions for detecting ESP, as some users were complaining that fwupd did not properly detect their ESP that didn’t have the correct partition GUID set. Although I think fixing the GUID is the right thing to do, the system firmware also falls back, and pragmatically so should we.

Fix detection of ColorHug version on older firmware versions, which was slightly embarrassing as ColorHug is one of the devices in the device regression tests, but we were not testing an old enough firmware version to detect this bug.

Fix reading BCM57XX vendor and device ids from firmware – firmware for the Talos II machine is already on the LVFS and can replace the non-free firmware there in almost all situations now.

For this release we had to improve synaptics-mst reliability when writing data, which was found occasionally when installing firmware onto a common dock model. A 200ms delay is the difference between success and failure, which although not strictly required seemed pragmatic to add.

Fix replugging the MSP430 device which was the last device that was failing a specific ODM QA. This allows us to release a ton of dock firmware on the LVFS.

Fix a deadlock seen when calling libfwupd from QT programs. This was because we were calling a sync method from threads without a context, which we’ve now added.

In 1.5.0 we switched to the async libfwupd by default, and accidentally dropped the logic to only download the remote metadata as required. Most users only need to download the tiny .jcat file every day, and the much larger .xml.gz is only downloaded if the signature has changed in the last 24h. Of course, it’s all hitting the CDN, but it’s not nice to waste bandwidth for no reason.

As Snap is bundling libfwupd with gnome-software now, we had to restore recognizing GPG and PKCS7 signature types. This allows a new libfwupd to talk to an old fwupd daemon which is something we’d not expected before.

We’re also now setting the SMBIOS chassis type to portable if a DeviceTree battery exists, although I’d much rather see a ChassisType in the DT specification one day. This allows us to support HSI on platforms like the PineBook Pro, although the number of tests is still minimal without more buy-in from ARM.

We removed the HSI update and attestation suffixes; we decided they complicated the HSI specification and didn’t really fit in. Most users won’t even care and the spec is explicitly WIP so expect further changes like this in the future.

If you’re running 1.5.0 or 1.5.1 you probably want to update to this release now as it fixes a hard-to-debug hang we introduced in 1.5.0. If you’re running 1.4.x you might want to let the libcurl changes settle, although we’ve been using it without issue for more than a week on a ton of hardware here. Expect 1.5.3 in a few weeks time, assuming we’re all still alive by then. :)

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hughsie