fwupd 1.6.0

I’ve just released the first release of the 1.6.x series, and since 1.5.x some internal plugin API has been changed and removed. Although we’ve tested this release on all the hardware we have regression tests for, bugs may have crept in; please report failures to the issue tracker as required.

There are several new plugins adding support for new hardware and a lot of code has been migrated to the new plugin API. The public libfwupd API also has some trivial additions, although no action is required.

This release adds the following notable features:

  • Add a composite ID that is used to identify dock device components
  • Add an Intel Flash Descriptor parser
  • Add API to allow the device to report its own battery level
  • Add API to refount why the the device is non-updatable
  • Add lspcon-i2c-spi programmer support
  • Add more hardware support to the pixart-rf plugin
  • Add some more new category types for firmware to use
  • Add support for downloading the SPI image from the Intel eSPI device
  • Add support for some Analogix hardware
  • Add support for writing SREC firmware
  • Add the firmware-sign command to fwupdtool to allow resigning archives
  • Split UEFI EFI binary into a subproject
  • Use an OFD or Unix lock to prevent more than one fwupdtool process

This release fixes the following bugs:

  • Actually write the bcm57xx stage1 version into the file
  • Add option to disable the UEFI capsule splash screen generation
  • Avoid use-after-free when specifying the VID/PID in dfu-tool
  • Cancel the GDBusObjectManager operation to fix a potential crash
  • Check PixArt firmware compatibility with hardware before flashing
  • Do not check for native dependencies as target dependencies
  • Do not use help2man to build manual pages
  • Fix a crash when shutting down the daemon
  • Fix build on musl
  • Fix build when using BSD
  • Fix /etc/os-release ID_LIKE field parsing
  • Force the synaptics-rmi hardware into IEP mode as required
  • Never allow D-Bus replacement when a firmware update is in operation
  • Offer the user to refresh the remote after enabling
  • Remove unused, unsafe and deprecated functions from libfwupdplugin
  • Simplify asking the user about reviews
  • Write BMP data directly without using PIL
  • Write synaptics-rmi files with valid checksum data

From a Fedora point of view, I’m waiting for the fwupd-efi new package to be reviewed and approved, and then I’ll upload the new version for Rawhide only. I might put 1.6.x into Fedora 34 after a couple more minor releases, but at the moment I’m keeping it with the 1.5.x stable branch which has all the important fixes backported. There’s a lot of new code in 1.6.x which needs to settle.

Published by

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.