by 
Fwupd 1.9.16 has been released today as a new maintenance update to this open-source Linux firmware update utility for Linux-based operating systems that brings support for new devices and some important changes.
As reported earlier this week, fwupd developer and maintainer Richard Hughes announced that the firmware updater is moving away from XZ Utils after the backdoor fiasco and will adopt Zstandard (zstd) instead for compressing the metadata. Well, fwupd 1.9.16 is the first release to use zstd over xz.
Fwupd 1.9.16 adds support for new devices, including Acer T34 and U33 docks, Qualcomm Series 5 Gen 1 and Gen 2 devices, Qualcomm Series 3 Gen 1 and Gen 2 devices, Several Puya SPI chips, as well as VIA VL822 C0 devices.
On top of that, this release fixes some bugs in fwupd to correctly record UEFI success if adding ESRT nodes, ignore attribute-changed to workaround a regression in macOS, ignore ZFS zvols when finding the default ESP, mark Pluton TPMs as part of the main CPU, and recognize zfsbootmenu in ESP detection heuristic.
Also fixed is a qsi-dock warning that appeared when writing chunks, a possible warning in the fwupdmgr command when excluding releases, and a fastboot warning that showed when loading a device.
Last but not least, fwupd 1.9.16 adds a workaround for a kernel bug by deferring the DP Aux MST scanning during hotplug, removes the post-update version checking when the device needs to be rebooted, and puts the fwupd-efi verbose debugging in the journal.
For more details about the changes included in this update, check out the release notes on the project’s GitHub page, from where you can also download the source tarballs if you fancy compiling fwupd on your GNU/Linux distribution. Otherwise, you should update to this version from your distro’s software repositories.
Image credits: Fwupd
Last updated 4 weeks ago
