Firmware upgrade and notification (fwupd)

[maciej-lech]

Hey!

This is a continuation of the discussion from ublue-os/bluefin#3172.

Goals

1. Enable firmware upgrades (or just notifications).

Proposal

1. Add a firmware module

This module would use the fwupd service, either through DBus or fwupdmgr.

For reference, similar implementations already exist in other tools:
GNOME Software’s fwupd plugin¹ and Canonical’s firmware-updater DBus service².

This module is disabled by default.

2. Add firmware module flags

--disable-module-firmware         Disable the firmware update module (shorthand for --policy-module-firmware=disabled)
--policy-module-firmware string   Set the firmware module policy: disabled, notify-only, update-only, update-and-notify

It will allow adding similar --policy-module-xxx for other modules in the future, still preserving backward compatibility.

Related Tickets

#110

Alternative Solutions

1. Add upgrade notification in GNOME Firmware (https://gitlab.gnome.org/World/gnome-firmware/-/issues/71)
2. Restore GNOME Software as it already has firmware upgrade notification included

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Best regards,
Maciej Lech

Footnotes

1. https://github.com/GNOME/gnome-software/tree/main/plugins/fwupd ↩

2. https://github.com/canonical/firmware-updater/blob/main/apps/firmware_updater/lib/services/fwupd_dbus_service.dart ↩

[maciej-lech]

If the design is approved, I can do the implementation.

[renner0e]

I think this is a great idea, would be quite handy for Aurora as we don't use discover anymore and don't really have any other nice way of notifying users of firmware upgrades.

Clarifying I'd be +1 for the notifications but not auto updates.

[inffy]

I would also be +1 for the fwupd notifications. Hard no for auto-updates

[castrojo]

Agree with the others, this is a great improvement!

[maciej-lech]

Just to clarify:

1. You would prefer to have fwupd notifications enabled by default?
2. You say no for auto-updates like:
   1. I don't want this to be enabled by default
   2. I don't even want this to exist in uupd

I included fwupd updates here, just to be consistent with the rest of functionality as this is "update" tool not just "notification" tool. I am not going to use it either in this automatic way, although running uupd --policy-module-firmware=update could be handy once the notification popup and I verify what will be updated. Originally, I though that both will be disabled by default - fully backward compatible.

Thanks for your feedback ;)

BR/ Maciek

[inffy]

Just the notifications of available firmware updates, nothing else is needed.

[renner0e]

Just thinking out loud here, so the user sees the notification and then what?
What does the user have to do now/what app/command to run etc.

Thank you for wanting to work on this.

[castrojo]

I don't think we can launch gnome-firmware when the user clicks on the notification can we?

[maciej-lech]

I don't think we can launch gnome-firmware when the user clicks on the notification can we?

After a quick research, in GNOME we can add buttons (libnotify actions), but no action is triggered when we click on the notification itself. Just on the buttons. It is a slightly different case in KDE, as it has better support for libnotify, i.e. we can have a default action attached when a user clicks the notification body.

Using actions with notify-send implies --wait, so it become a blocking operation, but we can handle it in goroutine with some decent timeout (duration, for the notification to appear on screen). The one problem may be, that currently, we wrap notify-send execution in a sub-shell spawned by the machinectl. Unfortunately, we can not just use libnotify go bindings as uupd.service is a system service not user.

cmd := exec.Command("/usr/bin/machinectl", "shell", fmt.Sprintf("%d@", user.UID), "/usr/bin/notify-send", "--urgency", urgency, "--app-name", "uupd", summary, body)

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Another alternative, that we haven't discussed is to use motd-based solution known from the Ubuntu Server. As firmware upgrade is more for a power-user anyway, maybe it make sense to only notify in terminal via motd?

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BR/ Maciek

[maciej-lech]

Moved configuration part to the separate ticket: #120

[castrojo]

motd update would be an improvement, and we use it already for the "your image is over 30 days old" notification already.