Numerous Lenovo laptops will soon receive firmware updates

Aug 6, 2018 19:04 GMT  ·  By

Open Source software and GNOME developer Richard Hughes announced today that Chinese computer manufacturer Lenovo had recently joined the LVFS (Linux Vendor Firmware Service) initiative in an attempt to offer Linux users automatic firmware updates.

According to Richard Hughes, who officially welcomed Lenovo to LVFS, tens of thousands of Linux users will soon receive automatic firmware updates in the coming weeks either through the GNOME Software graphical package manager or by running the fwupdmgr update command in a terminal emulator.

In the coming months, hundreds of thousands of Linux users will also receive automatic firmware updates for their Lenovo computers as the team of developers behind the Linux Vendor Firmware Service initiative will move numerous Lenovo models from the testing channels to the stable ones.

“Bringing Lenovo to the LVFS has been a lot of work. It needed changes to the low level fwupdate library, fwupd, and even the LVFS admin portal itself for various vendor-defined reasons. We’ve been working in semi-secret for a long time, and I’m sure it’s been frustrating to all involved not being able to speak openly about the grand plan,” said Hughes.

Only fairly recently produced UEFI hardware will be supported

As one might expect, the firmware updates for Lenovo devices will only be supported for fairly recently created UEFI computers, not very old machines from 10 years ago or older. Also, Richard Hughes said that he has no idea if other Lenovo-branded hardware will be supported shortly with automatic firmware updates or not.

While the automatic firmware update process might produce some discomfort to Linux users with Lenovo laptops, the developers assure us that they are doing they’re best to fix any annoyances as soon as possible. For now, users will experience multiple reboots with strange beeps during firmware updates, but they should not panic.

Automatic firmware updates for Lenovo computers running a Linux-based operating system works even with SecureBoot turned on. However, if you manually enabled the BootOrder lock, you will have to turn it off before updating the firmware of your laptop. The automatic firmware update for Lenovo has been successfully tested with Fedora 28 Workstation and recent versions of fwupd and fwupdate.