New LVFS redirect behavior

tl;dr: if you’re using libfwupd to download firmware, nothing changes and everything continues as before. If you’re using something like wget that doesn’t follow redirects by default you might need to add a command line argument to download firmware from the LVFS.

Just a quick note to explain something that some people might have noticed; if you’re using fwupd >= 1.6.1 or >= 1.5.10 when you connect to the LVFS to download a firmware file you actually get redirected to the same file on the CDN. e.g. downloading https://fwupd/download/foo.cab gets a redirect to https://cdn.fwupd/download/foo.cab which is then streamed to the user. Why this insanity?

As some of you know, egress charges from AWS are insanely high. The Linux Foundation are the kind people that kindly pay the LVFS bill every month, and a 4 years ago that was just a few hundred dollars and that was a rounding error to them. Last year we again grew at more than 100% and the projection for next year is going to surpass even that; the average size of firmware files has gone from ~30MB to ~50MB with much, much, larger server firmware in the pipeline. We certainly can’t watch the egress bill scale linearly with the LVFS popularity, else some accountant at the Linux Foundation is going to start asking questions – especially when Fastly provides the LF a geo-replicated CDN – which we’re not using.

So why don’t we put the CDN URL in the XML metadata directly, and then avoid all this redirect complexity altogether? This time the lawyers get us, as we’re required by US law to restrict distribution of some firmware to some countries on an embargo list. It’s very complicated, and it varies by vendor, but it’s not something we can avoid. So for this reason, the LVFS does a GeoIP lookup on the client IP, and if it’s all okay we then redirect the client to the CDN-cached version. It also lets us tell the vendor how many times the firmware has been downloaded without importing the CDN logs every 24 hours – which would be even harder as we only keep them for a short time for privacy reasons.

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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.

2 thoughts on “New LVFS redirect behavior”

  1. Just an FYI, but Fastly and really any reasonable CDN have all the same kinds of geo specific routing features. Maybe there’s a reason that needs to be done in fwupd, and duplicating the policy in Fastly may be non-trivial, but I suspect you could do all if this right at the edge in the CDN. Anyways, good for you for getting a real CDN involved. There’s a reason they exist.

    1. It’s slightly more complicated in that each firmware can have it’s own embargo policy. It would also be another round of talking to lawyers, something I’m keen on avoiding if I can! :)

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