1. Proposed title of this feature request

Provide a unified way to handle FW updates from OpenShift.

e.g: NIC FW, Accelerator Cards, Server FW

2. What is the nature and description of the request?

Today HW vendors provide their own utility and mechanism to update the FW which is usually:

• not always automated
• requires manual intervention
• different for each vendor

Overall the FW update is not cloud-native.

e.g:

• INTEL provided a utility called NVMUpdate utility that is used to update the FW of their E810 NIC cards. (More details can be found here: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2050082)

That utility is not shipped by Red Hat and requires special handling for it to work on Red Hat CoreOS Nodes.

• NVIDIA/Mellanox uses NVIDIA Firmware Tool called MFT.
• HPE leverages the iLO

3. Why does the customer need this? (List the business requirements here)

• Customers are required to handle FW updates more and more often to address bugs in NIC (SmartNIC) or simply address security vulnerabilities. 
• OpenShift deployments are such that manual interventions are problematic: A large fleet of SNO OpenShit could be deployed in environments with constraints. (physical access, Remote access)

4. List any affected packages or components.

Red Hat CoreOS Nodes