Let me clarify a bit more. As I made a statement in my post above that was too broad.
Starting at 13th gen Intel, we can update the CSME region using capsule update, so this can be distributed using LVFS. You can also check the CSME version using the ESRT table (eg fwupdmgr get-devices) which is fully exposed.
For 11th and 12th gen however, this was not supported by the BIOS vendor, so we were not able to support this.
Yes we are looking at what it would take to bundle the CSME updater utility in Linux along side manually installing the update using fwupdmgr. But I have a lot of concerns about doing this method.
- we have to cross test a lot of distributions. Various kernels etc.
- If users follow the exact flow that we currently do using EFI/windows, we want this to be as foolproof as possible(which is a low bar). I still have a lot of concerns that asking a user to perform manual steps for a multi part update process, and unexpected issues from the large number of linux distributions will cause a lot of customer unhappiness. Eg if we release a manual process, and it does not work on some distributions, then we will end up with even more unhappy people that are upset in the community.
So for me the priority is to fix issues and improve the update process on EFI first (which covers the broadest possible set of use cases). And then we can start looking at enabling a manual LVFS based updater.
I am also working on revamping our instructions, and improving bug reporting. As we are getting lots of valuable feedback from the community that we are going to improve our updates with. As well as regressions that the community is reporting. However in the last few updates community feedback has been very light, and repro steps and descriptions could be much better to allow us to narrow down on the issues faster.
We really appreciate all the community here, and your support and feedback. We are getting this into our ticketing system and trying to repro cases as well. So that we can keep improving our firmware.