Problem/Justification
(What is the problem you are trying to solve with this feature/improvement or why should it be considered?)
LVFS and its utility fwupd provide a way to easily fetch and update firmware for various components on a user’s system.
For example, you can update firmware for Samsung SSDs, or firmware for Intel ARC graphics cards.
Updating firmware is often necessary to fix serious bugs with firmware, like the incident with Samsung 990 PRO SSDs, which shipped with firmware that caused rapid health degradation.
With Intel cards, it can also fix issues with the how the fan works (an issue on Sparkle Intel ARC cards), or even significantly improve performance.
Impact
This will allow TrueNAS users to easily update without having to boot into Windows (who wants that?!), compile vendor specific tools or boot from clunky ISOs from manufacturers.
All that’s needed is terminal access to the machine and your hardware being supported - it’s that easy!
And if the user does not want to update firmware, they can just… not use the tool. It’s entirely optional.
User Story
I wanted to update firmware for my Intel ARC graphics card, which are very popular among NAS enthusiasts, which Intel recommends to do to fix various issues and even improve performance.
However, it doesn’t seem feasible under TrueNAS, at least not without a lot of effort, as it’s unavailable in standalone form, and you can’t really build it yourself under TrueNAS due to lack of build tool packages.
It’s available in Debian repositories, so it should be very easy to include it with TrueNAS.