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tpwrules / nixos-apple-silicon

Resources to install NixOS bare metal on Apple Silicon Macs
MIT License
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question: is there ever a need to update the proprietary firmware during normal operation? #87

Closed montchr closed 1 year ago

montchr commented 1 year ago

Aside from during initial installation and during recovery/rescue, do I need to be mindful of updates to the non-free/non-redistributable firmware? The docs say the only way to update this firmware is via the EFI partition and that it doesn't change unexpectedly. Is there any situation where I must/should update the firmware, e.g. after a macOS system upgrade?

For context, if it matters, I am using flakes and have the proprietary firmware stored in a private git repo and included as a flake input for setting the path to the hardware.asahi.peripheralFirmwareDirectory. So, if something changed, I would need to update the private repo manually.

I only ask for my own peace of mind so that I don't accidentally break something through ignorance. If this is not a silly question, perhaps the answer could be added as a note in the docs?

tpwrules commented 1 year ago

The firmware is set up by the Asahi installer and specific to the macOS version the Asahi installer has used. To my knowledge, this has not changed for a particular machine since the first official alpha release of the installer back in early 2022.

Therefore, there's no update to be done yet. If this changes in the future (the need for an update or the procedure for doing so) I will update the docs.

montchr commented 1 year ago

Good to know, thanks for confirming!

Excellent job by the way – I had absolutely no issues following the guide.

bkchr commented 11 months ago

@tpwrules don't we need a way now to update the firmware now? To get the webcam blob?

tpwrules commented 11 months ago

Unfortunately there is no official way to do this still.

There are manual instructions available from upstream for this specific case here and the necessary actions were called out in the nixos-apple-silicon release notes (though I didn't have the link available to put in at the time).

I have some plans to be able to do this automatically through Nix but haven't had time to work on them properly.

bkchr commented 11 months ago

Ahh at least there are some manual instructions! Ty!