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 means we can trivially support new devices in the future without compiling
any new code. This makes it easier to add support for new hardware for LTS
distros like RHEL.
This makes more sense; we're updating the device, not the plugin itself.
This also means we don't need to funnel everything through callbacks like
GFileProgressCallback and we can also update the state without adding an
explicit callback to each derived device type.
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.
