[Feature] Request to add firmware info of docking station and Thunderbolt

[William Hsu]

As a QA BRO user, I would like to be able to view firmware information of docking station and Thunderbolt on a launchpad ticket so that it can help the assignee to know which docking station or Thunderbolt firmware injects a bug.

[Acceptance Criteria]
@ AC001
GIVEN a docking station connects to the laptop
WHEN a user launches the QA BRO
THEN the QA BRO automatically attaches the firmware info of 1) docking station and 2) Thunderbolt on a launchpad ticket. E.g., (https://bugs.launchpad.net/somerville/pm-fe-support/+bug/1842375)
#-------------------------------------------------
[Additional information]
...
Precision 7730 Thunderbolt Controller: 41.0
Dell Thunderbolt Dock: 27.0
...
#-------------------------------------------------

@ AC002
GIVEN a docking station is disconnected
WHEN a user launches the QA BRO
THEN the QA BRO hides the fields of "Dell Thunderbolt Dock" and "XXX Thunderbolt Controller".

[Others]
The following commands may help to retrieve the firmware information of docking station and Thunderbolt
u@u-Precision-7530-26152:~$ sudo fwupdmgr get-devices
Precision 7530 Thunderbolt Controller
  DeviceId: ae8f2f765611edf299d8093d3d8842f3200d2a67
  Guid: 22645246-0baf-5a0a-9efd-2a33652a82ab <- TBT-00d40889-native
  Summary: Unmatched performance for high-speed I/O
  Plugin: thunderbolt
  Flags: internal|updatable|registered
  Vendor: Dell
  VendorId: TBT:0x00D4
  Version: 30.00
  Icon: computer
  Created: 2019-08-29

Dell Thunderbolt Dock
...

[Pierre Equoy (pieq)]

William, could you add the full output of `fwupdmgr get-devices` from the device you're currently testing? Thanks.

[William Hsu (williamhsu)]

Hi, Pierre, thanks for your friendly reminder. :)
Please see the attachment (TB16_WD15_DOCKING_STATION_FIRMWARE_INFO.txt). The attachment includes TB16 and WD15 firmware info.

[Pierre Equoy (pieq)]

I investigated this a bit.

Currently, 18.04 LTS had fwupd v1.0.9-0ubuntu2. This version only has some human-readable output.

I contacted the author of fwupd who told me v1.2.6+ comes with another tool called fwupdagent that returns a json string containing all the information we'd need. Unfortunately, this version will probably never be available for 18.04. There is a snap version of fwupd that is more up to date, but I don't think we can control the installation and use of a third party snap from within qabro.

The only easy way for now seems to do string parsing using the human-readable output, which is not very good because it's prone to break easily (and it will, as fwupd v1.2+ already have different output...)