This would also help, for example, to go back to the nonfree firmware when the
alternate firmware did not work as well as hoped. It would also allow flashing
the firmware using an SPI programmer if everything went very wrong indeed.
This allows a device to identify with different streams, for instance a Lenovo
laptop could have a coreboot firmware or a AMI firmware. The GUIDs would be the
same, but switching firmware would only be done rarely and very carefully.
Another example would be switching the Broadcom BCM57xx nework adaptors from the
vendor nonfree firmware with a signed PXE image, to the free software reverse
engineered driver with no PXE support (and thus no signed DXE) at all.
It is expected firmware would have additional metadata something like this:
...
<branch>sdcc</branch>
<description>
<p>
This is an alternate firmware built by the community using only free
software tools.
</p>
</description>
<requires>
<id compare="ge" version="1.5.0">org.freedesktop.fwupd</id>
<client>switch-branch</client>
</requires>
...
Additionally, alternate branch firmware will not be returned for clients not
setting the FWUPD_FEATURE_FLAG_SWITCH_BRANCH before the GetReleases request.
This changes allows for downloading firmware from a remote server
pointed from a local remote manifest.xml.gz file
Change-Id: Id00870f9c2817d48d6d301d2b6d229ba1ca6045a
This is required when the calling application needs the low-level soup-session
with the user agent set correctly rather than using the helper methods like
fwupd_client_download_bytes().
This is what GNOME Software needs to handle the GsApp progress completion.
This takes care of downloading the correct files and allows remotes to be
refreshed from other CLI and GUI tools without copying large chunks of code.
This also allows us to download the metadata without writing two temp files
to the users cache directory. Although not security sensitive, it's probably
not a good idea if we can avoid it.
The logic here is that we can use one central session for all client actions.
Also, set the user agent for the *runtime* version of fwupd -- it's the runtime
version we use when checking capabilities, rather than the built-against
version. This would also explain why there are so many very obsolete versions
of fwupd being recorded on the LVFS...
At the moment we just blindly assume the capabilities of the front-end client
when installing firmware. We can somewhat work around by requiring a new enough
fwupd daemon version, but the client software may be older or just incomplete.
This would allow, for instance, the firmware to specify that it requries the
client to be able to show a detach image. This would not be set by a command
line tool using FwupdClient, but would be set by a GUI client that is capable
of downloading a URL and showing a PNG image.
Clients that do not register features are assumed to be dumb.
The idea here is that we can show the user both a string and an optional
line-art image when the update has completed. The line art is often more well
understood for non-English speakers.
This allows the client to easily query metadata to upload with the report,
without exporting rarely used attributes as D-Bus properties on the interface.
It also allows us to add extra metadata values in the future without changing
the public API.
To do this, rely on the AppStream ID to map to a translated string (providing a
fallback for clients that do not care) and switch the free-form result string
into a set of enumerated values that can be translated.
This fixes some of the problems where some things have to be enabled to "pass"
and other attributes have to be some other state. For cases where we want the
user to "do" something, provide a URL to a wiki page that we update out-of-band
of fwupd releases.
The HSI specification assigns a simple text ID to the current state of firmware
security. As new vulnerabilities are found, and as protection measures are
updated, new requirements will be added to the required firmware behaviours for
each HSI value.
The HSI specification is currently incomplete and in active development, and
so the --force flag is required in all command line tools. The current ID value
will probably change on a given platform so please do not start using the result
for any kind of compliance requirements.