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Re: Firmware versions for Intel Wireless 6005/6205



On Wed, 2013-04-17 at 03:19 +0100, Ben Hutchings wrote:
> There's an error message that's bugging me at every boot:
> 
> [    5.178355] iwlwifi 0000:03:00.0: firmware: agent aborted loading iwlwifi-6000g2a-6.ucode (not found?)
> 
> Indeed, it's not installed; firmware-iwlwifi in testing/unstable has an
> older version, and the driver does fall back to that:
[...]
> More importantly, will the installer complain about this unavailable
> firmware file (as in #689416)?

I've now tested this, and unfortunately the installer does complain.  I
put firmware-iwlwifi 0.36+wheezy.1 on a separate memory card, and when
prompted for the missing file (under the new filename) I answered yes.
Looking at the kernel log, the driver loaded the older firmware
successfully.  (In fact, I think the installer must have installed
firmware-iwlwifi even before asking me this question.  Otherwise it
would have listed the older filenames too.)

It then asked the same question again, and I had to answer no to
progress.

I see three options:

(a) Update firmware-iwlwifi to include the new firmware.  Slightly risky
as our users haven't been testing it.

(b Change the driver to request firmware ABI 5 then 4.  Trivial code
change, and only has a negative effect for users that installed
firmware-iwlwifi from experimental.

(c) Change the driver to request firmware ABI 5, then 6, then 4.  Bigger
code change; allows people to use the new firmware if they want it but
not if they install the firmware-iwlwifi package (as that will have both
ABI 5 and ABI 6 until post-jessie).

I think (b) looks like the only viable option.

Ben.

-- 
Ben Hutchings
The first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club.

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