How to do firmware updates with QubesOS 4.2?

User Support
1

Hi,
I am new to QubesOS and currently looking for a way to update the firmware of my Notebook.
I had a Linux distro before which had the option of doing the firmware updates via a GUI.
I searched online for a way and found that since the Qubes 4.2 version that the fwupd is included.

I searched on their github and tried the following command:
fwupdmgr refresh

I got this response:
updating lvfs
downloading…
failed to download file: Could not resolve host: cdn.fwupd.org.

It seems that dom0 does not have access to get the updates.

Then I was looking in the forum and people were recommending this approach:
qubes-fwupdmgr

I thought this “workaround” is not necessary anymore since the 4.2 version. Or is this the normal way to use commands in dom0?

thx.

1 Like
2

Welcome!
Theres documentation for this feature currently missing:

The command you’re looking for is sudo qubes-fwupdmgr --help
Unfortunately it didn’t work for me. Command always froze and never finished even after multiple minutes, tried sys-firewall and sys-whonix.

This is by design. dom0 is isolated for security reasons.
Since you’re new you might want to do a bit of reading the documentation:

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3

I was curious about this so I just tried it out. The packages were not installed for me in dom0. I had to install fwupd-qubes-dom0 (version: 1.8.14-5.fc37).

Running sudo qubes-fwupdmgr get-devices listed out several devices on my system.

I then found that I needed to run refresh before get-updates.

Running sudo qubes-fwupdmgr get-updates just hangs, as I believe previously mentioned. I suspect that the tool and command get-updates is attempting to read some data from a file that is empty or does not exist (until after running refresh). The traceback shows execution at a line intended to read data. Instead of generating an error, it just hangs.

Traceback after interrupting get-updates:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/sbin/qubes-fwupdmgr", line 731, in <module>
    main()
  File "/usr/sbin/qubes-fwupdmgr", line 709, in main
    q.get_updates_qubes()
  File "/usr/sbin/qubes-fwupdmgr", line 586, in get_updates_qubes
    self._get_dom0_updates()
  File "/usr/sbin/qubes-fwupdmgr", line 196, in _get_dom0_updates
    new_data = os.read(mstdout, 4096)
               ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
KeyboardInterrupt

Running commands in this order seems to work:

  1. sudo qubes-fwupdmgr refresh
  2. sudo qubes-fwupdmgr get-updates

Generates:

======================================================
Dom0 updates:
======================================================
No updates available.
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4

Would your provided CLI instructions apply to a Star Labs build with AMI (American MegaTrends) installed as the UEFI BIOS?

5

It does look like Star Labs has some LVFS support so it might work. However, Star Labs is outside my knowledge and experience.

Good luck.

1 Like
6

Thank you for the resources link! :pray:t3:

7

sudo qubes-fwupdmgr refresh doesn’t work for me:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/bin/qubes-vmexec", line 5, in <module>
    sys.exit(main())
             ^^^^^^
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/qubesagent/vmexec.py", line 55, in main
    os.execvp(command[0], command)
  File "<frozen os>", line 574, in execvp
  File "<frozen os>", line 597, in _execvpe
FileNotFoundError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory
Failed to refresh remote 'lvfs': Metadata download failed.
1 Like
8
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9

Thanks! Installing fwupd-qubes-vm fixed it. Currently no updates found for me so I can’t check if actually installing updates works.

10

I checked through a live Ubuntu stick; I had one update and performed it there; dom0 had said there were none.