Enabling software longevity

When building products to last, it’s not enough to design the hardware to be repairable, upgradeable, and customizable. The overall longevity of devices as complex as modern notebooks also depends on how long the software and firmware continues to be useful. That includes compatibility updates to support newer generations hardware modules, fixes for bugs or compatibility issues found by end users, and especially patches for security vulnerabilities. We recognize that we have fallen short of where we need to be on software updates, and we are making the needed investments to resolve this.

We now have a dedicated team of engineers at our manufacturing partner and a set of internal stakeholders focused on ongoing software updates for all of our products, going back to our original Framework Laptop with 11th Gen Intel Core. In the past, we were reliant on ad-hoc availability of engineering time from our suppliers (basically borrowing staffing from whichever new product development we had ongoing). This was inconsistent and resulted in slow progress. With a dedicated team, there is no longer resource contention, and we are able deliver shorter turnaround times from discovering issues to resolving them.

We are rotating the team between each of our previously launched platforms based on the updates we need to make, like security fixes from upstream suppliers, community-reported bugs, and in some cases, new features and functionality. Our overall software release process for firmware and drivers is now as follows:

1. Identifying and prioritizing the issues and updates the sustaining engineering team will work on for a release for a specific platform.
2. A multi-week development and validation cycle.
3. Internal testing by additional Framework team members of a candidate release.
4. A Community Beta release, which we announce in the relevant sub-forum in the Community.
5. After a one to two week period of beta testing, if no substantial regressions are identified, public release onto our BIOS and Drivers download page.

We’d love to provide a specific length of time we can commit to for ongoing BIOS updates for each generation, but we’re dependent on the support lifetimes of our upstream silicon vendors who in some cases haven’t shared public end of support dates. Instead, we can state that our intent is to provide security updates for at least as long as our silicon vendors are able to. Note that this specifically applies to the UEFI firmware and drivers that are provided to us as binaries. For the embedded controllers in our laptops and for Framework Laptop 16 Input Modules, our firmware is fully open source. This means we have full access to make updates as needed, and the broader community can contribute as well. You can access the source for these on GitHub.

If you currently have a Framework Laptop, here’s the latest firmware you can pick up. We have updaters available for both Windows and Linux. We strongly recommend always running the latest released BIOS and drivers, as there are both security and bug fixes incorporated:

• Framework Laptop 13 (11th Gen Intel Core) - 3.19 is the latest release. We’ll be doing a further release with additional security updates.
• Framework Laptop 13 (12th Gen Intel Core) - 3.08 is the latest release. This incorporates fixes for all known UEFI security issues, including LogoFAIL, and adds support for the 61Wh Battery. This is released for Windows, and for Linux we’re developing a new updater to handle the specific firmware regions involved.
• Framework Laptop 13 (13th Gen Intel Core) - We’re currently in development on a release that incorporates both bug fixes and security fixes.
• Framework Laptop 13 (AMD Ryzen 7040 Series) - 3.05 is the latest release, which we published earlier this week. This includes fixes for LogoFAIL along with assorted bug fixes. You can also pick up our latest driver bundle from that page.
• Framework Laptop 16 (AMD Ryzen 7040 Series) - 3.03 is the latest release, which we also published earlier this week. You can pick up the driver bundle there too.

With each of these complete, we've resolved both infrastructure and process issues that now make it faster for us to iterate on BIOS and driver updates on each platform. Obviously, our words here are not enough. We need to and commit to demonstrating this by actually improving both our iteration speed on software updates and our communication processes around them. We’re also continuing to grow our team’s capabilities to support our products and customers. We currently have several team members we’re actively recruiting for who will join this effort:

• A Firmware/Software Engineer, bringing additional skills and adding bandwidth to the team.
• An Escalations Support Specialist, handling technical customer support escalations and bringing field issues to our engineering team.
• An Engineering Technician, adding validation and regression testing capabilities to the team.

Finally, we have one last, completely unrelated update to share today: our products are now available for shipment to Poland. We had originally planned to share this today as part of a different newsletter topic, but rather than making our Polish customers wait, we’re launching on schedule. We have a bigger update that we’re looking forward to sharing with all of you next week.