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Comment by arcfour | Hacker News Reader

LVFS doesn't exist? UEFI?

I mean updating it. Often the update are just windows only..

For example I've had this dell Elitebook where I've installed Debian wiping out Win. While on windows system prompts Bios update practically every week but been years in Linux on same bios. IIRC updates were win only or jump thru some complex rings of fire. Haven't bothered looking up in a while..

I've also had to disable some protection such as security before I could install Debian though I guess there's a way if I research hard enough.

If it's Dell, they're one of the most prolific, if not the most, on LVFS. All of my Dell hardware gets firmware updates via fwupd. Dell is conservative with marking their BIOS updates, though, and you might have to enable the testing LVFS repository for regularly updated BIOS.

If you mean HP EliteBooks, it doesn't have to be any more complicated than 1) extract BIOS archive 2) drag & drop BIOS file 3) reboot.

You download the BIOS update .exe, run 7zip on it, and take the BIOS.BIN file and either stick it in the root of your EFI partition and it will install automatically on boot, or just run `fwupdtool install-blob BIOS.BIN` and it will install automatically on reboot.

HP publishes updates to LVFS regularly for both their laptops and their thunderbolt docks(!)

I believe Elitebooks are Ubuntu Certified, which I would imagine gets their firmware updates pushed to LVFS.

Personally, with the Thunderbolt Dock 4 and an HP ZBook G10, I have gotten timely (<30 days of release) automatic updates from LVFS for both on Ubuntu/Fedora with 0 effort on my part.

Thanks I'll check out for my 840. Didn't know about this.

Just an update...learning something thanks...installed fwupd and it said something about disabled service.

Ran fwupdmgr (thanks Google) and it lists a whole bunch of hardware on my laptop as "device with no update found", included in that are UEFI device firmware, UEFI dbx, System firmware etc.

I will check further, thanks again. Didn't know about this.

Sorry for mixup. I have both but in this case I was referring to Dell latitude not HP Elitebook.

I'll check on the point you have made, see if I can update bios. Thanks.

I have updated my HP laptop's UEFI 4-5 times now using LVFS with HP's officially published updates. Just did it 2-3 days ago, in fact, for the latest update. I got a GUI prompt that there was a firmware update for my system, I clicked install, it said it would reboot my system, and I said ok and went to go make tea. Came back to a login screen and the update installed successfully.

I have used Secure Boot with Linux for several years now, too. Microsoft signed the shim loader and most distros can do it out-of-the-box now, much like fwupdmgr (above).

I think the biggest thing is finding, for example, devices that are Ubuntu Certified. You don't have to use Ubuntu necessarily, but the whole ecosystem benefits from hardware manufacturers having a slight degree of accountability having done this.

> Often the update are just windows only..

That's a choice the vendor makes, and Tuxedo Computers is the vendor in this case. Since they control the product they're making, they should be able to provide nice firmware updates for Linux users. They just decided not to even try, I guess?

The issue is that Qualcomm is critical path in that and they don't cooperate nicely even with Microsoft

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