This project aims to make updating firmware on Linux automatic, safe, and reliable.
Additional information is available at the website.
- GitHub issues & discussions in this repository
- Libera IRC channel
#fwupd. You can join through Libera's IRC or via the IRC bridge on Matrix.
See Building and Debugging for how to build the fwupd development environment.
NOTE: In most cases, end users should not compile fwupd from scratch; it's a complicated project with dozens of dependencies (and as many configuration options) and there's just too many things that can go wrong.
Users should just have fwupd installed and updated by their distro, managed and tested by the package maintainer. The distribution will have also done some testing with how fwupd interacts with other software on your system, for instance using GNOME Software.
Installing fwupd using Snap or using Flatpak might be useful to update a specific device on the command line that needs a bleeding edge fwupd version, but it should not be considered as a replacement to the distro-provided system version.
Tartan is a LLVM static analysis plugin built to analyze GLib code. It can be installed and then run using:
mkdir build-tartan
CC=clang-17 meson ../
SCANBUILD=../contrib/tartan.sh ninja scan-build
This project is configured by default to download firmware from the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS).
This service is available to all OEMs and firmware creators who would like to make their firmware available to Linux users.
You can find more information about the technical details of creating a firmware capsule in the hardware vendors section of the fwupd website.
If you have a device with firmware supported by fwupd, this is how you can check for updates and apply them using fwupd's command line tools.
# fwupdmgr get-devices
This will display all devices detected by fwupd.
# fwupdmgr refresh
This will download the latest metadata from LVFS.
# fwupdmgr get-updates
If updates are available for any devices on the system, they'll be displayed.
# fwupdmgr update
This will download and apply all updates for your system.
- Updates that can be applied live will be done immediately.
- Updates that run at bootup will be staged for the next reboot.
You can find more information about the update workflow in the end users section of the fwupd website.
If the Passim project is also installed
and enabled, fwupd will re-publish the downloaded metadata file to be served on 0.0.0.0:27500
by default.
Other clients on the same network can make use of this via mDNS/LLMNR to reduce network bandwidth to configured remotes.
To disable this functionality either set P2pPolicy=none in /etc/fwupd/daemon.conf, uninstall
the passim package or use systemctl mask passim.service on the terminal.
fwupd will encourage users to report both successful and failed updates back to LVFS. This is an optional feature, but encouraged as it provides valuable feedback to LVFS administrators and OEM developers regarding firmware update process efficacy.
The privacy policy regarding this data can be viewed on the lvfs readthedocs site.
To report the status of an update, run:
# fwupdmgr report-history
Only updates that were distributed from the LVFS will be reported to the LVFS.
The flow of updates can be controlled in the enterprise using the "approved updates" feature. This allows the domain administrator to filter the possible updates from a central server (e.g. the LVFS, or a mirror) to only firmware that have been tested specifically in your organization.
The list of approved updates can be enabled by adding ApprovalRequired=true
to the remote configuration file, e.g. lvfs.conf. Once enabled, the
list of approved updates can be set in fwupd.conf using a comma-delimited list.
For example:
ApprovedFirmware=foo,bar
Where foo,bar refers to the container checksums that would correspond
to two updates in the metadata file.
Additionally, the list of approved firmware can be supplemented using
fwupdmgr set-approved-firmware baz or using the D-Bus interface.
fwupdmgr is a command line client, but various additional graphical frontends are enumerated in the fwupdmgr man page.
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