There are commits to the Thunderbolt kernel driver that make sure
that the upgrade process goes smoothly. If these commits aren't
present then it will look like a fwupd problem, when it's actually
a kernel problem.
When this issue was reported it appeared that commit
e4be8c9b6a
was missing from the locally tested kernel, but it's impossible
to determine that from userspace.
Prevent running the thunderbolt plugin on older kernels than that
set in `$sysconfdir/fwupd/thunderbolt.conf`.
By default that is set to 4.13.0, but if a distribution vendor has
backported all the necessary support it can be decreased to a lower
version for distro packages.
Thunderbolt has a new kernel interface starting from version 4.13,
which simplifies updating the host controller and devices: the
kernel now exposes a sysfs interface for the non-volatile memory
as a device node. This can be used to write the new firmware blob.
Updates are then triggered also via a simple write to a sysfs
file (nvm_authenticate), which in turn is also used for error
reporting.
The plugin should be functionally, but a few items are missing:
- image verification
- safe mode handling
Automake and autoconf are impossible to fully understand and Meson now provides
everything we need for a much smaller, faster, and more understandable build.
See http://mesonbuild.com/ for more information.
