The daemon creates a baseclass of either FuUsbDevice or FuUdevDevice when the
devices are added or coldplugged to match the quirk database and to find out
what plugin to run.
This is proxied to plugins, but they are given the GUsbDevice or GUdevDevice and
the FuDevice is just thrown away. Most plugins either use a FuUsbDevice or
superclassed version like FuNvmeDevice and so we re-create the FuDevice, re-probe
the hardware, re-query the quirk database and then return this to the daemon.
In some cases, plugins actually probe the hardware three times (!) by creating
a FuUsbDevice to get the quirks, so that the plugin knows what kind of
superclass to create, which then itself probes the hardware again.
Passing the temporary FuDevice to the plugins means that the simplest ones can
just fu_plugin_device_add() the passed in object, or create a superclass and
incorporate the actual GUsbDevice and all the GUIDs.
This breaks internal plugin API but speeds up startup substantially and deletes
a lot of code.
This pivots the data storage so that the group is used as the preconditon
and the key name is used as the parameter to change. This allows a more natural
data flow, where a new device needs one new group and a few few keys, rather
than multiple groups, each with one key.
This also allows us to remove the key globbing when matching the version format
which is often a source of confusion.
Whilst changing all the quirk files, change the key prefixes to be more familiar
to Windows users (e.g. Hwid -> Smbios, and FuUsbDevice -> DeviceInstanceId)
who have to use the same IDs in Windows Update.
This also allows us to pre-match the desired plugin, rather than calling the
probe() function on each plugin.
This saves all the USB plugins from connecting to the context and managing the
device lifecycle and allows devices that uses FuUsbDevice to be removed
automatically.
This makes supported plugins *much* smaller indeed.
This allows us to show the devices in a GUI with a nice icon. Some of the icon
mappings are not perfect and I'll be asking the GNOME designers for some
additions to the icon specification.
Custom vendor icons can also be specified, and /usr/share/fwupd/icons would be
a good place to put them. If vendor icons are used they should show a physical
device with the branding, rather than just the vendor logo.
This is a large commit that removes all the providers and turns them into
plugins. I think having both providers _and_ plugins was super confusing.
Plugins are loaded at runtime so you could in theory develop a new plugin
without putting it in the fwupd source tree, although there are no installed
headers or PC files as I'm not sure it's a good idea at this stage.
This commit moves all the per-provider docs, tests, notes, debug dumps and test
data to plugin-specific directories -- these also allows the plugin author to
"own" more of the source tree so we don't enforce fu- prefixes and the style
guide everywhere.
This allows us to run the same action on all the plugins in the future, so we
could have a prepare(FuPlugin, FuDevice) and cleanup(FuPlugin, FuDevice) run
on *all* plugins, so doing an update using one plugin would allow us to work
around hardware quirks in other plugins.
If I've broken your out-of-tree provider it's trivial to port to the new API
with sed and a fixed up build file. If you need help please let me know.
