This announcement confuses me, since I've been flashing UEFI firmware on linux-based Dell, HP, and IBM servers for many years. IBM's tools are particularly pleasant, since they're easy to integrate into configuration management tools.
I presume the "natively" here means that the Linux kernel has been taught how to do this, rather than some tooling written by the OEM being responsible for it.
Like the difference between installing the VMWare Toolbox on a Linux guest (which builds and injects proprietary kernel modules written by VMWare), vs. using open-vm-tools, whose modules live in the kernel tree to begin with and are maintained by the kernel devs.
