Please welcome Lenovo to the LVFS

I’d like to formally welcome Lenovo to the LVFS. For the last few months myself and Peter Jones have been working with partners of Lenovo and the ThinkPad, ThinkStation and ThinkCenter groups inside Lenovo to get automatic firmware updates working across a huge number of different models of hardware.

Obviously, this is a big deal. Tens of thousands of people are likely to be offered a firmware update in the next few weeks, and hundreds of thousands over the next few months. Understandably we’re not just flipping a switch and opening the floodgates, so if you’ve not seen anything appear in fwupdmgr update or in GNOME Software don’t panic. Over the next couple of weeks we’ll be moving a lot of different models from the various testing and embargoed remotes to the stable remote, and so the list of supported hardware will grow. That said, we’ll only be supporting UEFI hardware produced fairly recently, so there’s no point looking for updates on your beloved T61. I also can’t comment on what other Lenovo branded hardware is going to be supported in the future as I myself don’t know.

Bringing Lenovo to the LVFS has been a lot of work. It needed changes to the low level fwupdate library, fwupd, and even the LVFS admin portal itself for various vendor-defined reasons. We’ve been working in semi-secret for a long time, and I’m sure it’s been frustrating to all involved not being able to speak openly about the grand plan. I do think Lenovo should be applauded for the work done so far due to the enormity of the task, rather than chastised about coming to the party a little late. If anyone from HP is reading this, you’re now officially late.

We’re still debugging a few remaining issues, and also working on making the update metadata better quality, so please don’t judge Lenovo (or me!) too harshly if there are initial niggles with the update process. Updating the firmware is slightly odd in that it sometimes needs to reboot a few times with some scary-sounding beeps, and on some hardware the first UEFI update you do might look less than beautiful. If you want to do the firmware update on Lenovo hardware, you’ll have a lot more success with newer versions of fwupd and fwupdate, although we should do a fairly good job of not offering the update if it’s not going to work. All our testing has been done with a fully updated Fedora 28 workstation. It of course works with SecureBoot turned on, but if you’ve enabled the BootOrder lock manually you’ll need to turn that off first.

I’d like to personally thank all the Lenovo engineers and managers I’ve worked with over the last few months. All my time has been sponsored by Red Hat, and they rightfully deserve love too.