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Microsoft's New Approach to Updating Drivers and Firmware in Windows Systems
On Wednesday, Microsoft described its Component Firmware Update (CFU) effort, a new open source protocol that Windows developers can use to keep their drivers and firmware up-to-date.
The CFU protocol is an open source project hosted in the GitHub repository, providing examples of driver and firmware code for testing purposes. This is the kind of thing that independent hardware vendors and original equipment manufacturers could use for Windows systems.
The CFU protocol follows a model designed to better ensure that the firmware of a Windows system will only accept the appropriate updates. The protocol is able to sort the appropriate sequence of updates, for example. All updates arrive via the Windows Update software update system, but the target component determines whether the update should be applied or not. Microsoft has created the CFU protocol with the goal that these firmware and driver updates cause "little or no user disruption".
By "components", the announcement of Microsoft seems to be referring to computer chips. The announcement also refers to "subcomponents", which can be items such as keyboards and mice (see table).
Some third-party software developers will produce component-specific drivers and their updates will come in using their own protocols. However, with CFU, you only need to add one component in a CFU-compatible Windows system to gain management benefits. This CFU-compatible component retrieves the third-party vendor's software driver and passes it to the vendor component using this vendor's protocol.
Not everything is covered by the CFU protocol. If a system is blocked, it can not use CFU and there is no recovery mechanism. There are also no authentication, encryption or restore features offered by the CFU protocol. In addition, the CFU approach requires additional memory "to store incoming images".
In other words, it's not clear if this new mechanism will be able to avoid the problems seen earlier this month with the Windows 10 October 2018 update. For example, Intel drivers caused a loss of sound, while HP keyboard drivers caused blue screen problems for some users.
The main advantage of the new approach seems to be that the CFU protocol can help Windows systems to better identify which driver or firmware updates to use. For example, it can delay an update to install the updates in the correct order.
The announcement from Microsoft did not specify whether CFU would be the approach taken for all Windows systems. Apparently, CFU is just in the testing stage right now.
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