A new proposal has recently been submitted

Jun 5, 2015 03:00 GMT  ·  By

After having made several interesting proposals for the upcoming Fedora 23 Linux operating system, including the Cinnamon and Netizen Spins, Jan Kurik has announced earlier a new one, this time for adding the ability to perform firmware updates on UEFI machines.

The new proposal, entitled "System Firmware Updates," wants to be a self-contained change in the Fedora 23 Linux operating system, and it will add support for performing firmware updates on UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) machines, along with the ability to perform updates to peripheral firmware.

"This allows us to introduce firmware updates for specific machines in the future. Firmware updates are good," reads the proposal. "This depends on a re-factoring of efibootmgr and efivar-libs, as efibootmgr currently contains a lot of non-library functionality that fwupdate relies on."

Designed only for computers that support the UEFI Capsule Update mechanism

As one might have expected, the new functionality will work only on machines that support the UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) Capsule Update mechanism, as well as the UEFI 2.5's ESRT (EFI System Resource Table) feature, both of which are quite new technologies.

At the moment, support for updating the system firmware on such machines is generic in the Fedora Linux operating system, and it does not contain any actual delivery mechanism for the respective firmware images, simply because there are too few machines running Fedora that support this functionality.

However, the new implementation suggests that if the system firmware images are to be stored in the right place for the fwupd utility to detect them, and if the respective machine supports the aforementioned UEFI technologies, the firmware updates will then be automatically displayed in the GNOME Software application as updates, so users can installed them easily and quickly with a few mouse clicks.