I was a bit shocked to discover [sic] that Discover offers to update the BIOS on my Dell laptop (??)
Is this for real?
See my screenshot - I did my due-diligence and investigated. Yes, my BIOS version is at the version shown in the update 23-24 section - I searched at the Dell website and sure enough, 24 is the newest critical update.
But my concern was that the “vendor” is “unknown”. And the “distributed by” is “lvfs”. My other concern was file size - the screenshot shows 23mb, but I downloaded the BIOS update and it shows 32mb (as .exe)
I checked on lvfs
The Linux Vendor Firmware Service is a secure portal which allows hardware vendors to upload firmware updates.
This site is used by all major Linux distributions to provide metadata for clients
Any thoughts about this? Should I do it the traditional way and copy the .exe to the EFI partition, or enjoy to do a tap-n-click update?
This is interesting!! I’ve never seen this before.
I’d say the one concern is the file size difference. However, it could be that what is offered by LVFS is the raw BIOS update, and what you downloaded is the .EXE version, which includes software to do the update.
I guess it comes down to: do you trust the dedicated vendor update, or do you trust Discover to apply such a low level update?
That is a long existing feature and in general safe to use. fwupd searches lvfs for firmware. And disvover has built-in fwupd support since a long time (5 years since Plasma 5.14). See Arch wiki https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/fwupd
Discover isn’t technically installing anything. It’s just a frontend. And the firmwares available through the LVFS are provided by the upstream vendors.
