System76 and LVFS

#1

Post by vec » Fri, May 11, 2018, 5:29 PM UTC

System76 and LVFS
blog.system76.com

Re: System76 and LVFS

#2

Post by verbatim » Fri, May 11, 2018, 5:48 PM UTC

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?

Re: System76 and LVFS

#3

Post by amyjess » Fri, May 11, 2018, 5:50 PM UTC

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".

Re: System76 and LVFS

#4

Post by [deleted] » Fri, May 11, 2018, 5:51 PM UTC

verbatim wrote: post #2

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?

[deleted]

Re: System76 and LVFS

#5

Post by m-p-3 » Fri, May 11, 2018, 5:51 PM UTC

amyjess wrote: post #3

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".

To be fair, both sides are acting somewhat unprofessionally in this story.

Re: System76 and LVFS

#6

Post by discussedbefore » Fri, May 11, 2018, 5:52 PM UTC

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

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17037845

Re: System76 and LVFS

#7

Post by emeraldd » Fri, May 11, 2018, 5:57 PM UTC

verbatim wrote: post #2

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?

Based on there comments in the article, I'd say that was their conclusion:

    There is no other way to interpret this email other than LVFS won’t work well for us. UpdateCapsule is not supported by over a decade of machines in the field and could not be added without a firmware update.

Re: System76 and LVFS

#8

Post by kentt » Fri, May 11, 2018, 5:58 PM UTC

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.

Re: System76 and LVFS

#9

Post by dogma1138 » Fri, May 11, 2018, 5:59 PM UTC

discussedbefore wrote: post #6

RE: Don’t buy System76 hardware and expect to get firmware updates from the LVFS https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17037845

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

Re: System76 and LVFS

#10

Post by jackpot51 » Fri, May 11, 2018, 5:59 PM UTC

verbatim wrote: post #2

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?

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.