Firmware on the Edge

This project is focused on streamlining the integration and management of firmware for custom or off-the-shelf peripherals in edge systems.

We aim to simplify the development cycle by tying the lifecycle of RHEL Edge device firmware with peripherals' firmware.

Edge systems in many cases require interaction with the physical world to carry on their application, i.e.:

Medical devices
Drones
Industrial control systems
Vehicles
Agricultural control systems
Smart cities
Radar Systems
Anything with human interfaces

Interaction with the world requires special peripherals, sometimes custom built by our customers for specific purposes, sometimes off-the-shelf peripherals. Those peripherals, generally built on MCUs, carry firmware.

Embedding firmware in the operating system image

RHEL systems include the fwupd daemon since Centos/RHEL 7.4 in 2017. The fwupd project has been helping update our servers and laptop peripherals through the LVFS project since then. Vendors can publish firmware updates for their devices through the LVFS CDN.

Fwupd can also source firmware from local directories, which perfectly matches our purpose; we can enable ImageBuilder and osbuild to allow that, see:

COMPOSER-1931 osbuild: support creating/enabling fwupd remotes.
COMPOSER-1932 osbuild: embedding firmware from container sources.
COMPOSER-1933 osbuild: embedding firmware from LVFS.
COMPOSER-1934 composer: implement firmware embedding in images.

One option today, and we build or demo based on that, is embedding firmware in rpms and repositories, which we can then source and include in ImageBuilder. We explain this workflow, but we don't consider it a final solution since creating and exposing repositories is an unnecessary complexity in a world where container registries exist today; that is the reason behind COMPOSER-1934 and COMPOSER-1932.

Missing capabilities and future ideas

Fwupd cannot perform auto-updates. It's capable of detecting know devices, the firmware versions, informing via its api fwupdmgr get-devices --json about the status, and then accepting requests to update, downgrade or reinstall.

In this repository, we provide an experiment that performs updates on startup: fwupd-auto-update.

A future idea is to have a daemon that will perform auto-updates; this idea is proposed here: RFE for fwupd auto updates.

Updating devices and building custom firmware.

fwupd supports a variety of protocols to update devices, including many standards. When it's possible, the recommendation is to use a standard protocol, like DFU/DFUse in the case of USB. If a standard protocol is impossible, please look at the fwupd documentation on writing custom plugins.

Our examples in the (firmware-examples)[./firmware-examples] directory use the USB/DFU protocol, and the Rust language.

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