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Linux firmware upgrading utility fwupd has been updated today to version 1.9.7, a release that adds support for more hardware devices, new features, as well as various bug fixes.
Coming three weeks after fwupd 1.9.6, the fwupd 1.9.7 release is here to add support for more Synaptics Prometheus fingerprint readers, some Western Digital eMMC devices, more PixartRF HPAC devices, Logitech Rally System devices, as well as VIA VL830 and VL832 devices.
New features in this release include support for child device requirements in metadata, the ability to have more than one host BKC, the ability to delete BootNext as a post-reboot action as a workaround for broken firmware, support for parsing cabinet archives internally without depending on the libgcab library, and support for using close-ended mode for eMMC FFU for faster firmware updates.
Among the bugs fixed in fwupd 1.9.7, there’s a fix for a small memory leak discovered in the bulkcontroller component when getting device information, a fix for sending the Olson location to the bulkcontroller component instead of the timezone, and the implementation of a 60 seconds wait time for the bulkcontroller device after writing firmware.
With this release, fwupd now also retries to claim the interface of a USB device if it returns a “BUSY” state, no longer treats an immutable buffer as mutable in the vli plugin, no longer modifies the BootOrder by default as a workaround for broken firmware, no longer calls unimplemented functions when running under Wine, and no longer aborts the fwupdmgr update command when one updatable device has a problem.
Other than that, fwupd 1.9.7 drops the concept of HSI:INVALID:missing-data and displays HSI-0 instead, fixes the inhibiting of the Nordic HID dongle when peripheral updates are pending, and fixes the use of a longer timeout for the post-erase STM32 GetStatus.
Fwupd 1.9.7 is available for download from the project’s GitHub page as a source tarball that you’ll have to compile on your GNU/Linux distribution. However, it is highly recommended that you install or update fwupd from the stable software repositories of your distribution.
Last updated 6 months ago
