[announce] firmware-tools 2.0

[Michael_E_Brown at Dell.com]

Firmware-tools users,

  So, as you might have guessed by reading the traffic this week, ft2 was finally released this week. The major point of this release was to re-organize the code to allow for future extensibility. Here is a list of some of the highlights:

1) /usr/sbin/firmwaretool:  This is a single executable that replaces the formerly distinct inventory_firmware, update_firmware, and bootstrap_firmware. The old names are still provided as a convenience to those used to them.

2) Internal API improvements: There is now a defined plugin API which can be extended over time in a reasonable way. You can add completely new command-line interfaces to /usr/sbin/firmwaretool using the plugin API. As an example of this, the existing inventory, update and bootstrap executables were re-worked as plugins to firmwaretool. The internal API now is based on the same architecture that 'yum' uses, which has been around for a while and has been proven solid.

3) Integrated BIOS extraction: There is a new "firmware-extract" RPM that you can install which provides an "--extract" option for firmwaretool. Extracted BIOS images are, by default, placed into the update search path so they can be used by --update, if run as root. If run as non-root, use the --outputdir= option to specify a writeable directory. This tool should be a more robust tool than the extract_hdr tool in dell-repo-tools. Install both firmware-extract and dell-repo-tools to get maximum functionality.

4) Supported OS: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4+ (and derivatives), Fedora 7+, SLES10+. There are ports available for Ubuntu/Debian that still need to catch up to the latest release.

5) Rebuilt BIOS repository: All of the BIOS packages have been re-extracted and rebuild. The BIOS cron jobs have been re-instated so we should now have daily pulls of new BIOSes ready in the repository.

6) The firmware-addon-dell and dell-lsiflash RPMs have been updated to the new API.

7) There have been several random improvements to the inventory_firmware_gui tool.

I'll be working over the coming days to update the documentation.
--
Michael