Bug#785137: ITP: fwupdate -- Tools to manage UEFI firmware updates
(Just filling in details of my thoughts here, not arguing for or against
however you guys decide to name things.)
On Wed, May 13, 2015 at 12:12:11AM +0100, Ben Hutchings wrote:
> On Tue, 2015-05-12 at 17:48 -0500, D. Jared Dominguez wrote:
> > Okay, well, I talked to Peter on IRC. He pointed out that:
> > - While there may be other platforms with firmware update mechanisms
> > that work in Linux, they're fringe.
>
> There's already flashrom, which is also generically named but does
> support a wider variety of older flash firmware.
>
> ethtool can update firmware for some network cards.
>
> Many vendors provide specific tools to update firmware on Linux.
>
> > - It's in Fedora as fwupdate already, so having a different name is
> > confusing.
(I don't think I said this, and it isn't - fwupd is, which is a gnome
tool that will optionally use fwupdate.)
> Having a generic name which has already been used many times over is
> also confusing.
>
> Having no documentation is *really* confusing.
Yeah; it's still a relatively new project, and I'm well aware I need to
write a lot of docs.
> > - Its name doesn't currently collide with other software.
>
> Oracle has a program of this name for several operating systems
> including Linux:
> http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19960-01/html/821-2488/gyuui.html
Huh. For reasons I suspect are obvious, I'd really only looked for
tools that are free software/open source/etc.
> > - If there are other open standards for updating firmware, he'll happily
> > add support for those.
>
> All of them? I doubt it.
So there are three-ish categories here:
1) updating system firmware
2) updating firmware on a peripheral
3) writing programmable parts whether they're "firmware" or not.
As far as I know, there's 1 open standard for the first thing, the same
open standard for a subset of the second thing, a couple of common
things that aren't really open for the second thing (though the ethtool
API is at least a de facto standard for it in a way), and then flashrom
et al doing the third thing.
Just FWIW I'm perfectly open to any open standard for the first thing,
and I'd like to get to the point where we can handle the second with
this utility as well for all the cases where we know how (which could
involve a DSO plugin API or whatnot at some point...).
The third thing, I don't really a firmware update, even if you're using
it to update system firmware - and the class of system where you can do
so by e.g. banging on SPI pins that are memory mapped is rapidly dying
off anyway.
> > So, unless there's a compelling reason (actually several given the
> > above), I'm going to stick with fwupdate.
It really doesn't matter to me what you call it in debian fwiw ;)
> For every action, there is an equal and opposite criticism. - Harrison
Perfect :)
--
Peter
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