Update and possibly a warning:
I’m still a newbie to anything UEFI related. I stumbled around searching and came across this article, from which I cargo-culted that running:
sudo systemctl reboot --firmware-setup
might “bootstrap” that OsIndications
EFI variable - which it apparently did. After rebooting with that command, trying sudo fwupdmgr update
again let the BIOS update “complete”.
Only the BIOS version, as seen in both the BIOS menu and the dmesg
output, never changed, before or after rebooting as prompted. I tried multiple times, both from the command line and in the GNOME Software UI tool.
Eventually, after trying this with the Software tool, I rebooted the laptop only for it to go into a bricked/bootloop state. When pressing the power button the fan would start, the power light would go on, then a LED pattern that ended with several green blinks would follow, and eventually the laptop would seemingly power down - only to spontaneously wake up again and repeat the pattern. During this the screen backlight would not switch on at all.
I managed to get the laptop booting again by powering off then pulling the CMOS battery for a minute or so. When I reinstalled it, the two side LEDs were flashing red (I assume that’s an indication that BIOS variables/settings have been restored to factory?) until I powered the laptop on again.
At that point the laptop resumed working normally, still at BIOS 3.02, and at factory settings.
So, not sure where the bug is here or if this is somehow user error. But it looks like the test BIOS, at least as it is packaged on LVFS currently, is not “safe” for all distros.