What Is The System Firmware Update Utility?

You may start seeing a new update offered titled System Firmware Update Utility. What exactly is this and what does it fix?

Starting with the X1 Carbon Gen 13, and eventually common for all ThinkPad 2025 products, this System Firmware Update Utility now bundles:

  • System Firmware
  • UEFI BIOS
  • Embedded Controller Firmware (ECP)
  • Intel Management Engine Firmware
  • Power Delivery Firmware

This can be found in the ReadMe

ReadMe

Here is what is presented in Commercial Vantage.

CV

Inspecting the package XML descriptor, we can see these updates are a RebootType 5 (reboot delayed) and PackageType 4 (Firmware).

XML

The end-user experience shows a counter and which firmware is being updated now, which is helpful.

UI

The System Firmware Version can be found in the BIOS Setup Main page. It is a version number representing the collection of UEFI + EC + ME + PD firmware.

BIOS

While this is a great improvement in update delivery and reduces the amount of separate updates for a given device, with it comes implications. There will be the challenge of having multiple versions of different updates within the package that also has its own version number. If a future update is released that keeps the same version of BIOS but includes a newer version of the Intel MEFW, what would this look like if you're using the Get-LnvAvailableBiosVersion cmdlet from our Lenovo Client Scripting module?

On the bright side, this should make patching a bit less painful.