
System76 and LVFS - vec
http://blog.system76.com/post/173801677358/system76-and-lvfs-what-really-happened
======
JepZ
Btw. regarding the Dell XPS advice found in the original post:

Three years ago I bought an Dell XPS 15. After a few month the touchscreen was
broken (did not respond to any input). As I didn't really need it, it took me
a few weeks before I contacted Dell. Their support tried to fix the devices
remotely for nearly an hour (flashing firmware updates), the touchscreen was
still broken. So they send a technician who tried to repair the device in my
kitchen. Sadly he didn't have a replacement screen with him, so a few days
later another technician came and replaced the screen.

Afterwards the touchscreen worked again. But a few weeks later the Screen
started to flicker occasionally. At first I wasn't sure if it was related to
the battery level or some software error, as it just happen from time to time
and I wasn't using the device that often anyway. But after searching online
for the issue and having used the laptop with Windows and Linux for months I
am confident that it is another hardware malfunction. Sadly the warranty is
long time over.

I liked the effort the support put into fixing the device, but I am a little
disappointed to have had so many hardware issues for a device with such a high
price. And while I had very few driver issues, the overall quality of the
product didn't convince me to recommend it :-/

~~~
djsumdog
I had similar issues with an XPS 15. The battery started swelling and popped
up the touchpad (I think that's covered under warrant with a recall; just need
to take it in). The speakers have no over current protection and blew out (to
be fair HPs don't have hardware protection either and can do the same thing).

I've also had a lot of cooling and throttling issues. I use to really like
Dells and have had other really good Dell laptops. Maybe I just got a bad
release and I probably shouldn't swear them off, but I'm probably going to
avoid them for a while.

------
acomjean
This is the whole open source community destroying (edit: maybe better term
would be "damaging") itself.

Basically it starts civilly about finding the one best way to do something.
They agree to disagree.

Then there 2 standards...Then 4, then 8 all not having the effort exerted to
make each solution great.

Then one party writes something like "don't buy this it not free/ doesn't do
this".

And in the end 99+% of people can't be bothered with the arguments and end up
running Mac/Windows laptops, harming the open source adoption goals of
everyone who was arguing before.

I still own redhat stock. Corporations love having a point of contact when
things go wrong and will pay for that.

~~~
iel99
Hyperbole

Dozens of projects have gone this way and the open source community still
exists

It’s almost as if the notion of one size fits all is a utilitarian idea to
simplify production of physical goods

We need to maybe look at why we keep trynna force that on more ephemeral ideas

I’m not obliged to speak English any one why. Why bother with making sure
everyone runs the same code or manages only one or two key projects
collectively?

Cause Big Corp? Meh.

~~~
iodiniemetra
Not hyperbole, a real problem that leads to interop issues. For example, the
hellish filesystem wars of the mid 2000s.

Most distros STILL ship ext4 despite there being better options.

~~~
jessaustin
Hellish? I was running linux back then (since 97 actually) and while there was
a fair amount of confusion, it wasn't due to the many choices we had, and
there was nothing hellish about it. The confusion was because we hadn't
realized that the right way to handle file system issues is to keep backups
and have automated rebuilds. In some tiny minority of cases you also need some
flavor of RAID. Other than that, why worry about file systems?

------
verbatim
This article doesn't seem to explain why they have a hard dependency on a
proprietary tool to flash the firmware.

There are no alternatives to AFUEFI?

~~~
jackpot51
I am the engineer at System76 that has been working on the low-level firmware
update procedure.

The only alternative is to reverse engineer the SPI flashing method. We have
switched to using FPT, the Intel Flash Programming tool, on new models. This
means that we need to reverse engineer the SPI update method, which is
something the flashrom project has had success in doing for older Intel
chipsets.

~~~
patrickg_zill
SPI is a standard, right? What is the problem in using SPI?

~~~
jackpot51
SPI is easy, and well understood. For firmware editing I often use an external
flasher for updating the ROM, and use flashrom to do so. Accessing the SPI bus
on the Intel chipset, from the computer itself, is undocumented and usually
requires reverse engineering.

~~~
monocasa
Which chipset? It was documented (albeit not super well) in the handful of
Intel chipsets I've had to support for firmware updates.

~~~
jackpot51
Kaby Lake and Kaby Lake R, for example

~~~
monocasa
OK, neat, it looks like they haven't changed it in eons. It's PCI device
00:1f.5 and is documented in all of the PCH docs (so Vol 1 for overview, Vol 2
for registers). Sometimes it's disabled by firmware as a sort of 'security'
mechanism.

Yeah, there's not a whole lot there in the docs, but it's PIO SPI that handles
most of the flash addressing for you, so it's not the most complex thing in
the world to begin with. More "fill the buffer and go" sort of deal.

~~~
amluto
But, if your firmware cares about preventing flashable rootkits, then these
registers _should_ be locked such that you can only flash from SMM or during
initial boot. The fact that AFUEFI works at all on a System76 laptop is a bad
sign IMO.

~~~
jackpot51
It absolutely is locked, and needs to be unlocked and flashed while in EFI
mode.

~~~
amluto
What do you mean “in EFI mode”? Do you mean EFI Boot Services or something
else? I’m trying to understand what makes AFUEFI special that causes it to be
able to write the SPI flash when regular software can’t. If I understand your
blog post right, AFUEFI run like any other .efi program, which seems
insufficiently locked down to me.

------
discussedbefore
RE: Don’t buy System76 hardware and expect to get firmware updates from the
LVFS

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17037845](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17037845)

~~~
dogma1138
My guess would be because AMI or their OEM (Cleve) requires they use it for
support.

------
Iolaum
Since we are giving feedback to system76 I was shopping for a laptop 1+ year
ago and was considering system76. When I inquired about buying an Oryx Pro
they said that they would disable the onboard gpu and I could not use it. I
ended up buying a laptop elsewhere. It took me ~ 6 months to find out how to
properly use/switch_to the iGPU (spoiler: acpi_osi kernel parameter in grub)
but now I do and can properly chose between battery endurance and performance.
Ideally a linux vendor would fix these problems instead of limiting what one
can do with the hardware. On the other hand requiring a user to change grub
kernel loading parameters isn't a level of customer support that would get
positive reviews. However a sizable number of linux users are "enthusiasts"
(as people who don't use linux like to call us) and, personally, if I am to
pay more for a linux laptop, I expect the manufacturer to facilitate tinkering
to get the most out of it (ie allowing me to switch gpus or run any distro I
want) instead of hindering that option.

------
amyjess
The whole "Be wary" section is a really unprofessional swipe borne out of pure
retaliation. It isn't germane to the discussion at all, and it's simply FUD
spread by System76 in retaliation to Red Hat's security and legal teams
balking at System76 wanting them "to ship a untrusted nonfree binary which
would get run as root on RHEL on customer machines".

~~~
m-p-3
To be fair, both sides are acting somewhat unprofessionally in this story.

~~~
ggm
_To be fair, both sides are acting somewhat unprofessionally in this story._

This. I think the whole "longer lever to move the boulder is to do this in
public" is a very very bad trend. Posting stuff like this is inflammatory, on
both sides.

~~~
basementcat
Based on recent electoral trends from around the world, this sort of engaging
spirited behavior may be exactly what consumers want.

~~~
Applejinx
That would be a belief that market behavior delivers optimal outcomes. If you
instead think that market dynamics can deliver very bad results, this makes
sense as an example of it: sure, consumers like seeing it, but it's not
helping and the consumers are wrong to think it is.

------
0x0
When a vendor talks about adding a "unique blockchain security infrastructure"
for firmware updates... I don't even

~~~
jackpot51
Blockchain, however muddied it is today, does have legitimate uses. In this
case, we use it to enforce a valid timeline of builds with cryptography.

~~~
0x0
I don't get it, do you allow adversary participants in on the network to vote
on firmware consensus? What's wrong with regular vendor digital signatures,
like everyone else does? :)

~~~
jackpot51
No. It is a blockchain, but is not distributed or mined. Firmware is built and
signed with the signature of the previous build as part of the artifacts.
This, in addition with a constraint that the timestamp can never move
backwards, means builds must have a valid timeline and it becomes very
difficult to hijack the publishing system.

Imagine you want to revert firmware for legitimate reasons. As the originator
of the firmware, you could revert the source code and have a new build spawn
that produces a valid artifact. With our system and with the typical system,
this is possible.

Now imagine you are an attacker who wants to release an older firmware
version, which potentially contains a vulnerability. You have access to the
publishing system, but not the build system or signing key. With our system
this is impossible, as consumers will not allow moving backwards to an older
build. With the typical system, any signed firmware blob can be released at
any time, meaning an older version can be made available without having to
rebuild.

Our build system utilizes a firmware signing hardware device connected to the
build server over serial with a strict protocol to ensure that leaking the key
is not possible, even if the build server is compromised. In addition, the key
is destroyed if this firmware signing device loses power (it does have a
battery backup, but it disconnects if the case is opened), and we must deploy
a new key in that event through software upgrades on client machines.

~~~
0x0
Sounds really complicated, couldn't you just replace all that blockchain
verification code with an "if (firmwareToInstall.version <
firmwareCurrentlyInstalled.version) return false" after the signature check?

------
BadassFractal
I personally dislike their hardware (I've owned Clevo / Sager for close to 15
years now, they've always felt cheap and plasticky), but I think their PPA and
support are great.

The problem is that it's not clear what exactly is better out there for Linux
enthusiasts who want a MacBook Pro-like experience out of the box. They're the
least worst solution on the market as far as I can tell.

~~~
ams6110
> Linux enthusiasts who want a MacBook Pro-like experience out of the box.

How big a group is this? Most enthusiasts like the ceremony of installing and
configuring their favorite distros to their likings.

Or am I misunderstanding what you mean by "enthusiast?"

~~~
robotbikes
Well considering before I switched to my System76 laptop I had to deal with
trying to get a proprietary video chipset working that also controlled my CPU
fan. It was not any fun and the result was a machine that would just plain
overheat when I ran Linux (also did it on Windows). On the other hand when I
had issues with my System76 machine I bought second-hand I was able to get
excellent support and the drivers all worked out of the box. So yeah I'd
rather buy a machine that has working drivers out of the box than waste more
hours of my life trying to troubleshoot getting some kind of proprietary chips
working.

~~~
BadassFractal
Right. I like Linux, but my company pays me to produce results, not to tweak
my machine all day just to make it work.

------
dman
The parts casting doubt about lvfs felt out of place to me.

------
kentt
Just don't touch system76. They're just low quality rebranded Sager laptops
with a crap version on Linux. You can just buy the same laptop and if you
really like their horrible version of Linux, then put that on there.

~~~
craftyguy
Alternatively, there's Purism ([https://puri.sm](https://puri.sm)), who
actually take security and build quality seriously.

Edit: looks like the system76 downvote brigade is hitting this discussion.

~~~
jimnotgym
The cheapest Purism seems to be $300 more than the cheapest System76. Is the
purpose of your comment to say that more expensive laptops are better?

~~~
monochromatic
Is that a controversial idea, that more expensive things are often better?

~~~
yjftsjthsd-h
I might not phrase it that way, but notice that it's not exactly a one-to-one
correlation. Given, y'know, that we are busy discussing hardware to run
Linux... Which is free in both senses. It's a stronger correlation in
hardware, but still imperfect; one brand being higher quality than another
while undercutting them by a couple hundred dollars wouldn't shock me.

