On Fri, 2020-12-04 at 22:08 +0100, Holger Wansing wrote:
[...]
While debugging this, I found that the "radeon" module - responsible
for this graphics card - is not included in the installer environment.
So, the kernel cannot load it when detecting the graphics card.
And because of that, the "check-missing-firmware" mechanism does not get
notified about missing firmware.
Is this intended this way?
On most architectures, the installer can use generic framebuffer
drivers (VGA, EFI, OpenFirware, or simple-framebuffer) as it does not
require high performance. Adding hardware-specific graphics drivers
would probably increase its size and memory requirements significantly.
(I was stumbling about the radeon module here, but apparently it's the
same
for other graphic cards too, like Intel? I don't find any video-output
kernel modules at all in d-i environment ...)
Would adding such graphics modules to the installer cause any harm?
Or could they be added, and get such problems sorted out?
Adding those drivers just to trigger firmware installation seems like a
silly thing to do. It wouldn't fix the issue in radeon or amdgpu,
because they don't have a working fallback for missing firmware.
(Debian carries a patch to make sure they abort probing early if it's
not installed. So this wouldn't cause a regression but it wouldn't log
the usual "missing firmware" message.)
Could this not be done in "discover"? If it can match PCI devices with
a specific class and vendor, that should be enough to decide that
firmware-amd-graphics (AMD, ATI) or firmware-misc-nonfree (Intel,
Nvidia) might be wanted.
Ben.
> Sorry, if I got something completely wrong here ...
--
Ben Hutchings
Lowery's Law:
If it jams, force it. If it breaks, it needed replacing anyway.
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