The upstream Raspberry Pi firmware/bootloader gets regular updates and improvements. In Fedora we ship that firmware in a package called bcm283x-firmware. I regularly follow the git repo of the upstream firmware and on occasion when I believe there’s reasonable changes that benefit Fedora I’ll prepare a new version, do some brief testing on my devices to make sure it boots and basic functionality hasn’t regressed at which point I’ll update the package and send it out to supported releases as an update.
Once the new bcm283x-firmware lands on your Raspberry Pi it doesn’t automatically update the firmware though. Why is that you ask? I don’t like to spring surprises on people where they end up with a device that might not boot or it might regress things they care about.
So how do you upgrade the firmware for the Raspberry Pi on Fedora? It’s simple! You simply run the command rpi-firmware-update and it’ll update the firmware and the u-boot to the latest one that’s shipped as a Fedora package. Then you just need to reboot to make it active.
The easiest way to work out which firmware you’re currently running is “dmesg | grep raspberrypi-firmware”
I tend to try and push out a new firmware update every month or so but if I see something that’s of interest or that fixes known issues I do it as needed.