Richard Hughes, the creator of the Packagekit project, recently announced the release of fwupd 2.0.0, a package offering a firmware updating background process and FwuPDMGR utility for firmware control. The project, written in SI, is distributed under the lgplv2.1 license. This update aims to streamline the firmware updating process for Linux systems by providing firmware from various manufacturers through the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS), which can be accessed using FWUPD tools.
The LVFS currently offers firmware for over 1600 devices from 160 manufacturers. This centralized catalog eliminates the need for manufacturers to create packets for distributions and allows the firmware to be transferred in the “CAB” archive format with additional metadata, similar to the publication of firmware for Windows.
FWUPD supports automatic updating without user intervention, as well as user-initiated updates. It is widely used in distributions like RHEL, Fedora, Ubuntu, Suse, and Debian, as well as in GNOME Software and KDE Discover application managers. The tool is versatile and can be used for updating firmware on various devices, including smartphones, tablets, servers, and IoT devices.
The latest update of fwupd includes several key improvements:
- Transition from using GObject bindings gusb to direct interaction with Libusb and SYSFS for device emulation using the LIBFWUPDPLUGIN library.
- Removal of the dependency on gudev in favor of NetLink sockets for analyzing UDEV events, resulting in reduced memory consumption and CPU load.
- Optimization to reduce memory consumption during firmware streaming by using file descriptors instead of copying firmware into memory.
- Added support for new devices, including Algoltek card readers with USB interface and amd kria som.