System Firmware Updates

Summary

This change is to add the ability to perform firmware updates on UEFI machines.

Owner

Name: Peter Jones
Name: Richard Hughes
Email: pjones at fedoraproject dot org
Email: richard at hughsie dot com
Release notes owner:

Current status

Targeted release: Fedora 23
Last updated: 2015-06-03
Tracker bug: <will be assigned by the Wrangler>

(It's actually pretty much finished, but the tracking bug doesn't exist to say that yet.)

Detailed Description

This adds the ability to perform updates of system firmware, as well as some peripheral firmware, on machines supporting the UEFI Capsule Update mechanism and UEFI 2.5's "ESRT" feature.

Right now this is generic support—the number of machines for which we actually have firmware updates available is very small, as the underlying technology is quite new—and it doesn't include any actual delivery mechanism for such firmware images. But if they're put at the right place for fwupd to notice them, and the system supports the right features, they'll show up as updates in gnome-software.

Benefit to Fedora

This allows us to introduce firmware updates for specific machines in the future. Firmware updates are good.

Scope

Proposal owners: Get fwupdate, fwupd, and a version of gnome-software that can use them into Fedora, maintain it in the future, etc.

Other developers: N/A (not a System Wide Change)

Release engineering: N/A (not a System Wide Change)

Policies and guidelines: N/A (not a System Wide Change)

Trademark approval: N/A (not needed for this Change)