The LVFS has now supplied over 100 million updates to Linux machines all around the globe. The true number is unknown, as we allow users to re-distribute updates without any kind of tracking, and also allow large companies or agencies to mirror the entire LVFS so the archive can be used offline. The true number of updates deployed will probably be a lot higher. Just 8 years ago Red Hat asked me to “make firmware updates work on Linux” and now we have a thriving set of projects that respect both your freedom and your privacy, and a growing ecosystem of hardware vendors who consider Linux users first class citizens. Every month we have two or three new vendors join; the logistical, security and most importantly commercial implications of not being “on the LVFS” are now too critical for IHVs, ODMs and OEMs to ignore.
Red Hat can certainly take a lot of credit for the undeniable success of LVFS and fwupd, as they have been paying my salary and pushing me forward over the last decade and more. Customer use of fwupd and LVFS is growing and growing – and planning for new fwupd/LVFS device support now happens months in advance to ensure fwupd is ready-to-go in long term support distributions like Red Hat Enterprise Linux. With infrastructure supplied and support paid for by the Linux Foundation, the LVFS really has a stable base that will be used for years to come.
As the number of devices supported by the LVFS goes up and up every week, and I’m glad that the community around fwupd is growing at the same pace as the popularity. Google and Collabora have also been amazing partners in encouraging and helping vendors to ship updates on the LVFS and supporting fwupd in ChromeOS — and their trust and support has been invaluable. I’m also glad the “side-projects” like “GNOME Firmware“, “Host Security ID“, “fwupd friendly firmware” and “uSWID as a SBoM format” also seem to be flourishing into independent projects in their own right.
Everybody is incredibly excited about the long term future of both fwupd and the LVFS and I’m looking forward to the next 100 million updates. A huge thank you to all that helped.
Hi Richard.
Thanks for creating this projet. Before this upgrading firmware was such terrible, having to use windows, or some DOS tools.
Just having bought a computer first time since 10 years, (a framework model), I’m happy it supports this channel. However upgrading the fingerprint was quite painful :-)
Best
> the logistical, security and most importantly commercial implications of not being “on the LVFS” are now too critical for IHVs, ODMs and OEMs to ignore.
And still Intel NUCs are not supported… Must be one of the most popular platform for Linux boxes out there I would expect…
https://github.com/fwupd/fwupd/issues/1401
So far for the “community pressure” :)
Intel initially said they would support NUC on the LVFS, but we got stuck on legal issues. Now NUC as been sold to ASUS I certainly wouldn’t hold your breath. The key is to buy hardware that *does* support LVFS, and tell the vendors (like Intel/ASUS) exactly why you’re not buying specific hardware. One crazy customer is easy to ignore, but 5,000 customers saying the same thing is very difficult to ignore.
Glad I bought a dell! They seem to be the best for Linux that I’ve known of… How has it been dealing with them on your side?
Dell and Lenovo have both been great. The other vendors have been *good* :)
Thank you.
I just updated the efi bios on my new Acer Aspire 5 with i3 11th gen. That’s something I’ve only done once in the past 25 years on any Windows rig. The process is too challenging. I’ve always felt it was better to let my computers run on the old firmware than take a chance at bricking my system with an improperly flashed bios. This is where your auto search for updates is a great feature. I was pleased with how easy the process ran on the most recent Kubuntu. I wasn’t aware that fwupd is such an ongoing project. Thanks!