Do fwupd and hardware.enableAllFirmware manage same firmware?

Help
1

I’ve noticed that I’m not using fwupd in my system configurations, and a question popped up:
does hardware.enableAllFirmware option covers same firmware as fwupd ?

If so - won’t fwupd’s changes be overriden on next boot?

If not - what exactly am I missing by not using fwupd?

Thank you

2

These two do not update the same type of firmware.

  • The hardware.enable{All,Redistributable}Firmware options are for packages like linux-firmware that contain binary blobs to be loaded on every boot. Many drivers require such firmware to work (e.g. amdgpu), and do not work at all without them.
  • The fwupd daemon, as far as I’m aware of, is for performing one-time, permanent updates for device firmwares that need to be flashed to the devices. It also supports updating the UEFI firmware on some machines.
    Most devices work fine without fwupd, just like UEFI updates are not strictly required most of the time, but the firmware updates may contain bug fixes and security patches that you’d be intereseted in. There’s a list of supported devices on LVFS.
2 Likes
3

Thank you, that answers my question.

Can I additionally ask: are there downsides of having fwupd enabled by default for all machine configurations?

4

Enabling the option makes fwupd.service available. The service itself doesn’t do anything without explicit usage of the fwupdmgr command, so I think it’s fine to enable it.