Bug#635840: carl9170 firmware missing from debian
Hi
On Monday 14 January 2013, Ben Hutchings wrote:
> On Tue, 2012-09-04 at 10:07 +0300, Riku Voipio wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > This is sad, someone actually releases their wireless card firmware
> > under GPL and we fail to get it included in Debian. Way to encourage
> > manufacturers to open source their firmwares and end users to buy
> > hardware with open firmware...
> >
> > This is quite classic case where perfect has beome the enemy of good.
> >
> > Could we just put the binary firmware file linux-wireless website[1],[2]
> > to firmware-linux-free for now, and do the build-from-sources firmware
> > for Jessie if if deemed neccesary?
>
> I don't believe it's absolutely necessary to build from sources during
> the package build, and indeed none of the other free firmware images are
> rebuilt. The problem has been that I couldn't quite reproduce the
> binary and the person submitting the firmware for linux-firmware.git
> didn't respond to my request for information.
I haven't checked the current binary versions, but previously default
settings and making sure to use similar (cross-)toolchain versions
achieved bit-identical results.
> Anyway, I had another look and worked out the undocumented build steps
> and I can now build a bit-identical firmware image, so I'm going to add
> it.
As mentioned in [1], I'd be willing to maintain or co-maintain a
firmware packages for carl9170, but this would need coordination (and
an ack) from you (as linux-firmware maintainer) and the kernel-team,
given that driver and firmware are both under development (and require
minimum versions of each). My preliminary packaging[2] (which I'm using
personally for quite a while) does build the cross-toolchain from
Debian's source packages for gcc/ newlib/ binutils during the package
build process[3]. This procedure is certainly not nice and needs
adapting whenever gcc changes (minor) versions, but it does build
everything from source - adding a formal sh-2/ newlib based
cross-toolchain would imho be overkill, especially as this wouldn't
be useful for anything else.
Regards
Stefan Lippers-Hollmann
[1] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=635840#40
[2] Vcs-Svn: svn://svn.berlios.de/fullstory/firmware-carl9170/trunk/
Vcs-Browser: http://svn.berlios.de/wsvn/fullstory/firmware-carl9170/trunk/
http://aptosid.com/slh/carl9170/
using build concurrency is recommended, as this significantly
reduces the build time for the cross toolchain.
[3] http://aptosid.com/slh/carl9170/_build.log.gz
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