
Dell Edge Gateway 5000 to support natively flashing UEFI firmware under Linux - finid
http://en.community.dell.com/techcenter/b/techcenter/archive/2016/02/02/dell-firmware-updating-under-linux
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stonogo
This announcement confuses me, since I've been flashing UEFI firmware on
linux-based Dell, HP, and IBM servers for many years. IBM's tools are
particularly pleasant, since they're easy to integrate into configuration
management tools.

~~~
derefr
I presume the "natively" here means that the Linux kernel has been taught how
to do this, rather than some tooling written by the OEM being responsible for
it.

Like the difference between installing the VMWare Toolbox on a Linux guest
(which builds and injects proprietary kernel modules written by VMWare), vs.
using open-vm-tools, whose modules live in the kernel tree to begin with and
are maintained by the kernel devs.

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wmf
AFAIK updating server firmware under Linux has been possible for years, so I'm
curious why this required a kernel update, a bunch of new packages, and fixing
hundreds of bugs. Is this a case of the standard way being 10x more complex
than the proprietary way?

~~~
creshal
The new standard way is supposed to be used by _all_ vendors, instead of a
slightly different proprietary method separately maintained by each. So you'll
have the usual "design by committee, with all committee members being direct
rivals" bloat.

And it seems that this is one of the first actual hardware implementations of
said method; the OS-side software implementation has so far only been tested
against emulators. It's not that surprising to see bugs here.

~~~
gioele
FWUPD is more a "from the devs but embraced by the vendors" effor:
[http://www.fwupd.org/developers](http://www.fwupd.org/developers)

~~~
creshal
FWUPD relies on UEFI Capsule Updates, which is the standardized firmware
update method I was talking about.

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jdboyd
I'm happy to see the news, but now I'm also very curious what the Dell Edge
Gateway 5000 is.

~~~
gilgoomesh
It's linked in the article:

[http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/dell-edge-
gateway-5000/pd?...](http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/dell-edge-
gateway-5000/pd?oc=xctoi5000us)

It's a ruggedized industrial-usage small-ish form factor fanless PC.

~~~
e40
What are those green ports on the back? They look like power supply
connectors. Does this require an external PS? I clicked around on the page you
referenced and didn't see anything that explained it.

~~~
gmmeyer
We have like 5 of these in the office. They have like 20 ports on them. I have
no idea what the majority of them do. I assume most of them are some
specialized binary data transport that I've never used or seen, though I have
some weird half memory of similar ports on an early 90s IBM PC.

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jkot
Some Dell laptops (new XPS 13) already support this. Place exe file with
firmware into UEFI boot partition, and choose it at boot time.

~~~
kingosticks
But that's not really flashing under Linux is it? That just sticking the file
somewhere their non-linux flash tool can see. Not saying that it's not helpful
to be able to do so, it does remove Windows from the equation (did it myself
just last night as it happens).

~~~
josteink
> But that's not really flashing under Linux is it?

Indeed not. But if we are going to nitpick, my first question would be what
value does being able to flash new firmware from inside Linux achieve compared
to what we have today: a OS-agnostic bootable update-medium?

~~~
noja
Less steps. No manual process.

~~~
josteink
But now we can have malware hijacking our firmware, seamlessly through
standard kernel APIs.

Is this really an improvement? Is it worth it?

~~~
noja
You would require root on the machine, and if you have root anyway...

Anyway you can already flash the firmware, just without a standard interface:
either with the uefi copy thing, or with a proprietary tool.

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ossreality
Oy vey folks, why not Google LVFS to see why it's interesting.

There's a new CLI tool and dbus api for discovering and installing firmware
updates that are securely hosted by redhat. There is also native support in
GNOME Software for surfacing the updates and making them available.

This means on a Dell server, you literally type: `fwupdmgr update` and all
possible firmware is updated.

So literally every comment in the thread so far is missing the point. This
doesn't require shelling in, putting it in the UEFI partition, orchestrating
your infrastructure to reboot the servers into the EFI partition to install
and then let it reboot back to Linux. You just type `fwupdmgr update`.

~~~
praseodym
Even Dell's iDRAC server management cards don't allow for firmware upgrades
this simple. You'll need their layers of additional (paid) management software
to update firmware without having to manually download it from their website.

