Regarding the new firmware update service available for Linux OEMs:
https://firmwaresecurity.com/tag/fwupd/
There is a new article from Dell on this topic:
(Published on behalf of Mario Limonciello, OS Architect of Dell Client Solutions Group’s Linux Engineering team.)
I’m happy to announce that starting with the Dell Edge Gateway 5000 we will be introducing support to natively flash UEFI firmware under Linux. To achieve this we’re supporting the standards based UEFI capsule functionality from UEFI version 2.5. Furthermore, the entire tool chain used to do this is open source. Red Hat has developed the tools that enable this functionality: fwupd, fwupdate, & ESRT support in the Linux kernel. For the past year we have been working closely with Red Hat, Intel, & Canonical to jointly fix hundreds of issues related to the architecture, tools, process, and metadata on real hardware. Dell will be publishing BIOS updates to the Red Hat created Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS). Red Hat provides LVFS as a central OS agnostic repository for OEMs to distribute firmware to all Linux customers. […]
Dell — along with Red Hat, apparently — are setting a great example, I hope other OEMs do as well with Linux. 🙂 It makes me think Dell is working to deal with this recent comment of William (of Dell):
Firmware Security 