Re: Bug#725714: udev firmware loading does not work in the Debian installer
On Fri, Dec 13, 2013 at 12:34 AM, Michael Biebl <email@michaelbiebl.de> wrote:
> Am 13.12.2013 00:26, schrieb Michael Biebl:
>> Am 13.12.2013 00:12, schrieb Andreas Cadhalpun:
>>> The Debian installer needs a way to load the firmware during
>>> installation, otherwise the netinst.iso is pretty useless for WLAN
>>> devices with non-free firmware.
>>> Since a majority of the WLAN devices need non-free firmware, just
>>> dropping this functionality without replacement is a serious regression.
>>> Therefore I ask you to re-enable it until a replacement is written.
>>
>> Could something like isenkram [1] be integrated into d-i and install
>> necessary (firmware) packages based on the modalias information?
>>
>> Especially [2] looks like it could be a replacement.
>> That said, isenkram-autoinstall-firmware doesn't seem to use the
>> modalias info and instead greps through the modinfo output which looks
>> like a rather hackish approach on a cursory glance.
>
> According to codesearch.d.n, hw-detect is the only tool using
> /run/udev/firmware-missing. I'm inclined to re-assign this bug to
> hw-detect and let the hw-detect maintainers decided how to handle this.
> If something like the isenkram approach would be suitable for them
PackageKit used it too.
General note: the entire idea of blindly recording firmware requests
is flawed. It makes not much sense to make assumptions about drivers
and that the files they ask for are *missing*, they are not in many
cases.
Many drivers just request things to check for updates which in many
cases never exist. Or they request multiple files in a row, to fall
back to older versions they find.
The only sensible way to produce information about *missing* firmware
would be to add explicit messages to the kernel when things are really
*missing*. Blindly tracing firmware requests and guessing around never
really made sense.
Also: That all this is gone now is a side-effect of moving firmware
loading into the kernel where it belongs. There is nothing userspace
can do about, the information is just no longer available to
userspace.
Kay
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