fwupd 1.5.3

Today we released fwupd 1.5.3 which has the usual smattering of fixes and enhancements you’d expect. One notable fix is that we now allow setting the GMainContext when used for sync methods, as some people reported problems with the way we implemented the sync libfwupd methods in previous 1.5.x releases. We’re now defaulting to the default thread context allowing the app to override if required, which seems to fix a lot of problems.

We’ve also merged some support code to support PS/2 devices. This included adding the device firmware ID for serio class hardware. In general I’m happy to help vendors with patches that affect the core parts of fwupd (e.g. things inside ./libfwupdplugin or ./src) but plugins themselves should now either be written by the IHV or by a consulting company employed by the IHV, ODM or OEM. There are now dozens of companies adding support for new hardware all at the same time and although I’m happy to review code, I still can’t write it all :) There are lots of consulting companies to choose from now.

We’ve also added back some compatibility code that allows apps running with old shared versions of libfwupd talk to a new running fwupd daemon – which shouldn’t be possible but then Snap decided to do just that and everything exploded.

Aleksander also merged a few patches to fix firmware updates over QMI on some hardware and to validate firmware update method combinations on mobile broadband hardware.

In the last release we also switched from libsoup to curl, but accidentally broke the RHEL build as it doesn’t quite have a new enough libcurl for us to use. There is now fallback code in place for these older versions.