Any UEFI capsule experts here?

[NickKz]

Over the past few days I have been looking at UEFI capsule releases from a few different vendors, trying to extract various thunderbolt 4 firmware files embedded within so I can compare them

 

I am using UEFITool (https://github.com/LongSoft/UEFITool), and I am able to pretty easily understand HP and Asus's image formats (even though the way HP stores the firmware in the capsule and updates it is different than how Asus does it)

 

However for MSI, I am stumped...even for an identical chipset board that Asus uses, a Z690 board, with the same TB4 maple ridge controller...I just can not figure out where in the cap MSI are storing the TB firmware image or how they are updating it in the UEFI code.

 

With Asus:

 

Updater app is TbtNvmDrvShellUpdate (5EDCCC1A-F4CA-42F4-8D3E-CA4C0B396BF7)
Actual update is performed by an EFI_FIRMWARE_MANAGEMENT_PROTOCOL (86C77A67-0B97-4633-A187-49104D0685C7) instance

Protocol instance for Thunderbolt installed by driver CCF23F50-F7C1-4F00-8E70-13643C37E8B0

NVM firmware update loaded from EED54281-1C11-4358-BF5A-F64995FBF11B on most (all?) ASUS boards with built-in Maple Ridge / TB4

 

With HP:

 

DXE updater at EED54281-1C11-4358-BF5A-F64995FBF11B
Actual TB4 firmware stored uncompressed in padding section at the end of the capsule, alongside several other binary firmware packages for additional I/O chips, USB-PD etc.

 

If anyone wants to take a stab at this, https://www.msi.com/Motherboard/MEG-Z690-ACE/support

I'm going based off of the assumption that original release (7D27v10 https://download.msi.com/bos_exe/mb/7D27v10.zip) has _some_ TB4 firmware in it...I checked the other releases as well, but couldn't find anything there either.

 

The other possibility is, MSI updates the TB4 firmware some other way, and it's not stored in the UEFI capsule at all...but I don't believe this to be true, as Intel have said as a policy with TB4 specifically that the way OEMs are supposed to handle updates is through UEFI caps.

MSI tech support of course are no help at all, but that's not surprising.