Remotes

Vendor Firmware

These are the steps to add vendor firmware that is installed as part of an embedded image such as an OSTree or ChromeOS image:

• Compile with -Dvendor_metadata=true to install /etc/fwupd/remotes.d/vendor.conf
• Change /etc/fwupd/remotes.d/vendor.conf to have Enabled=true
• Change /etc/fwupd/remotes.d/vendor.conf to have the correct Title
• Deploy the firmware to /usr/share/fwupd/remotes.d/vendor/firmware
• Deploy the metadata to /usr/share/fwupd/remotes.d/vendor/vendor.xml.gz

The metadata should be of the form:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<components version="0.9">
  <component type="firmware">
    <id>FIXME.firmware</id>
    <name>FIXME</name>
    <summary>FIXME</summary>
    <developer_name>FIXME</developer_name>
    <project_license>FIXME</project_license>
    <description><p>FIXME</p></description>
    <url type="homepage">http://FIXME</url>
    <releases>
      <release version="FIXME" date="2017-07-27" urgency="high">
        <size type="installed">86406</size>
        <location>firmware/FIXME.cab</location>
        <checksum filename="FIXME.hex" target="content" type="sha1">96a92915c9ebaf3dd232cfc7dcc41c1c6f942877</checksum>
        <description><p>FIXME.</p></description>
      </release>
    </releases>
    <provides>
      <firmware type="flashed">FIXME</firmware>
    </provides>
  </component>
</components>

The metadata and firmware should be signed using Jcat, ensuring the signing certificate is installed in the /etc/pki/fwupd location.

Automatic metadata generation

fwupd and fwupdtool support automatically generating metadata for a remote by configuring it to be a directory type. This is very convenient if you want to dynamically add firmware from multiple packages while generating the image but there are a few deficiencies:

• There will be a performance impact of starting the daemon or tool measured by O(# CAB files)
• It's not possible to verify metadata signature and any file validation should be part of the image validation.

To enable this:

• Change /etc/fwupd/remotes.d/vendor-directory.conf to have Enabled=true
• Change /etc/fwupd/remotes.d/vendor-directory.conf to have the correct Title
• Deploy the firmware to /usr/share/fwupd/remotes.d/vendor/firmware
• Change MetadataURI to that of the directory (Eg /usr/share/fwupd/remotes.d/vendor/)

Mirroring a Repository

The upstream LVFS instance will output a relative URL for firmware files, e.g. <location>bar.cab</location> instead of an absolute URI location, e.g. <location>http://foo/bar.cab</location>.

When setting up a mirror of the LVFS onto another CDN you just need to change the MetadataURI to your local mirror and firmware downloads will use the relative URI.