hughsie
commented
3 years ago IronOS has one firmware build for each language
So there are a few different ways for USB devices you can get a "custom" GUID. The easiest is to have a different USB PID for each language; that makes everything happen correctly with no code changes, although kinda sucks from a build-time complexity problem. I have a USB VID you can use if you want so certainly don't spend the $2000 to just get a new VID assigned -- and it has 0xfff2 PIDs remaining :)
The other way is to somehow tell fwupd what language the device is in; maybe using the extended descriptor thing from Microsoft or just something custom we have to add code for. You could even stick it in the serial number string index or something. Basically; if the device can export the data we can add code to fwupd to consume it.
so it will also need a custom quirk implementation to handle the wrong blocksize
So desc.wTransferSize is wrong? I can easily add a quirk to set that -- what's the VID/PID of the bootloader and what should the wTransferSize be in reality?
IronOS can be used as unofficial firmware for other soldering irons
If it helps, the LVFS already supports "branches" -- e.g. on the BC57XX network cards there's an unofficial open source firmware and the nonfree broadcom one and you can "fwupdmgr swithc-branch" between them.
LVFS does not have a specific icon for soldering icons
Ha! Got any ideas? it needs to be freely re-distributable and in the hicolor theme.
More seriously, I think the bigger problem is that the firmware doesn't seem to have a runtime; that is when you plug in the soldering iron you don't see a USB device being added, you only see one when the device is in bootloader mode. This means that fwupd can't get the current firmware version without the user manually going into bootloader mode first, which kinda sucks as:
- You don't get notified about new firmware
- The bootloader VID/PID can't be modified so you don't know what hardware you have attached
@Ralim seems to be open to the idea of a runtime interface for monitoring, and it would be trivial to implement a DFU runtime with all the required bits so that fwupd can enumerate the hardware to get the language and current firmware version and also automatically push it into bootloader mode. I think that's the prerequisite before we start talking about icons :)
t-8ch
Ralim
dal00
alvinhochun
gamelaster
The Linux Foundation operates a online repository of device firmware (the Linux Vendor Firmware Service, LVFS) at https://fwupd.org/ . This repository is currently consumed by the fwupd tool on Linux which provides a easy one-click update-experience to update device firmware.
It would be great if IronOS could be uploaded there and be at least published as the default firmware for the Pinecil. As fwupd already supports the USB DFU protocol that part should be reasonably straight forward. Some context: https://twitter.com/dal000/status/1344630316015755265
The following open points I see: 1) IronOS has one firmware build for each language. This does not seem to be supported in LVFS/fwupd currently, so it would need development there. 2) fwupd uses its own DFU implementation, so it will also need a custom quirk implementation to handle the wrong blocksize reported by the Pinecil DFU implementation (as dfu-util is GPL2 and fwupd is LGPL-2.1+ I don't think their implementation can be used as-is) 3) IronOS can be used as unofficial firmware for other soldering irons, is this something that can/should be supported by LVFS? 4) LVFS does not have a specific icon for soldering icons!
@Ralim is this something you would want to have? @hughsie As maintainer of fuwpd and LVFS what is your take on this?
Relevant issue for Pine64s official firmware updater: https://github.com/pine64/pinecil-firmware-updater/issues/1