Fwupd 1.5.6 Released with Support for System76’s Keyboard, Star LabTop Mk IV Laptop

Fwupd 1.5.6

Mario Limonciello announced today the release of fwupd 1.5.6, a new feature and maintenance update for Linux’s number one tool for updating firmware for your hardware.

Fwupd 1.5.6 is part of monthly updates to fwupd and introduces support for System76’s upcoming keyboard, the ability to download firmware from IPFS (InterPlanetary File System) using the fwupdmgr --ipfs update command and using the ipfs daemon, support for StarLabs’ Star LabTop Mk IV Linux laptop, as well as support for RMI PS2 devices found in newer Lenovo ThinkPads.

Furthermore, this release adds support for GD32VF103 RISC-V microcontrollers, which is used in development boards like the Longan Nano, brings back the ability to use an external services provider (ESP), and adds BAT metadata to the fwupd EFI binary.

There are also various improvements in fwupd 1.5.6, such as fully integration of the fwupd CI with Google’s oss-fuzz fuzzing service, a restriction for Lenovo hardware to install multiple capsules and checking if the fwupd BootXXXX entry exists on failure, the ability to ask users to reboot their systems when downgrading the hardware, and the ability to report the lockdown status from UEFI and SuperIO plugins.

“On some Lenovo hardware we’re limiting the number of UEFI updates to be deployed on one reboot as they appear to have slightly quirky capsule coalesce behavior,” said Richard Hughes.

On top of that, fwupd now no longer allows flashing using flashrom if BLE is enabled, no longer parses the OptionROM image, and improves the switch-branch feature to enable systems to switch between Coreboot and EDK2. Moreover, PCR0 has been included in the report metadata and the UX data is now installed into a single tar.xz file.

Various bugs were fixed as well in this release, such as the dnload wBlockNum wraparound for ST devices, OOM when using large ArchiveSizeMax values, several places where the Goodix MOC plugin could crash, and several crashes spotted by AddressSanitizer.

Also, fwupd is now more paranoid when parsing ASCII buffers and devices, clears the pending flag during system restart, no longer displays “Unknown [***]” for every client connection, and shows a console warning whenever the system clock is not set.

For more details, you can check out the GitHub release announcement page, from where you can also download the source tarball. However, the tarball needs to be compiled on your system, so I recommend updating fwupd from the stable software repositories of your favorite GNU/Linux distribution.

Last updated 3 years ago

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