Updating the BIOS firmware can be a pain if vendors only provide binaries for Windows™ on their homepage, especially when you are running an open-source operating system.

LVFS

Thanks to the Linux Vendor Firmware Service it's now much easier to update firmware on Linux. The LVFS supports a huge amount of devices, brings it's own firmware database, has a nice UI and periodically checks if new firmware updates are available. Hardware vendors can upload their firmware to LVFS, which charges no cost for hosting or distribution.

Coreboot on LVFS

To bring the open source coreboot™ firmware updates to every Linux user or customer, we started contributing to LVFS and added a coreboot version detection as the first step.

It turned out that lot's of runtime information are exported by coreboot™, but the Linux™ kernel doesn't expose them to userspace yet. The next step will be to extend the kernel and expose runtime infromation, to finally support A/B partition scheme updates using the libflashrom plugin that was added by 3mdeb earlier this year.

Once all task are completed,  OEM/ODM and IBVs can start shipping coreboot™ firmware updates to everyone.

If you want to know more about our firmware and security work please feel free to contact us at cybersecurity@9elements.com