The Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) with the Fwupd client makes it wonderfully easy to enjoy seamless system UEFI and device/peripheral firmware updates under Linux. LVFS is backed by a growing number of major OEMs/ODMs and serves up millions of firmware files. But they are in need of more financial resources from the biggest hardware vendors.
Currently the LVFS/Fwupd resources are provided largely via the Linux Foundation and the lead developer Richard Hughes being employed by Red Hat. AMD Linux engineer Mario Limonciello has also helped significantly in Fwupd in recent years as well. Richard Hughes is hoping to get more of the big OEMs/ODMs involved in providing financial or engineering resources to the project.
Hughes posted yesterday on Mastodon:
“I’m trying to get the biggest vendors to sponsor the LVFS. The Linux Foundation is kindly paying for all the hosting costs out of their IT budget, and Red Hat pays for all my time — but as LVFS grows and grows that’s going to be less and less sustainable longer term. I’m trying to find funding to hire a part time “me replacement” so that I can go on holiday for a week without stressing about internet and email.
…
make the mega-OEMs aware that there is a fair-use quota (although nothing happens if they go over) and that they should either be providing a person to help (like AMD does) or funding so that we can hire a fraction of a person. So far none of the other OEMs provide much help for the infrastructure itself.”
He also shared a draft presentation on Mastodon spelling out some of the support need by the major vendors:
Hopefully these efforts will be successful in allowing LVFS/Fwupd more resources to continue doing a splendid job making it easy for Linux users to enjoy effortless firmware updating on more hardware.
