Re: Pulling free firmware-ath9k-htc into the CD images
Hey John,
I hope you had a good Christmas!
On Wed, Dec 23, 2020 at 12:57:09PM -0500, John Scott wrote:
>On Wednesday, December 23, 2020 9:52:16 AM EST Steve McIntyre wrote:
>> Is this just going to be for x86 machines, or is it likely to be useful for
>> ~everybody?
>It will be useful for all architectures, except I don't think there are
>FreeBSD and Hurd drivers yet, but it's an arch:all package regardless.
Right. I'm more asking whether it's useful to try and pull this in for
all arches, or just for amd64 / i386 for now.
>> IIRC d-i uses kernel messages to work out what firmware to use. Is the
>> kernel driver still going to be looking for the older (non-free) firmware
>> still? If so, that should probably be changed.
>Well, the "nonfree" (quotes because I suspect it's built from the same
>free source, but by definition we can't be sure without an identical binary)
>firmware currently hijacks the proper name of the firmware. I'd love for
>my package to take it over, but if not a hack could be to set the kernel
>option to look for the "development" firmware.
Hmmm. In that case you'll need to talk to the kernel maintainers here,
surely? There's not much point having the firmware available if the
kernel isn't going to look for it AFAICS?
>> Ah... It would be more *normal* to ship the source. Is there a reason
>> not to?
>Sorry, should've revised my footnote from the mail to the kernel team. None
>of the firmware in firmware-free is built from source, and that's what I was
>expressing concern to. To the best of my knowledge, this package is the
>first to be built as such. (Given the recent Lenovo discussion on -devel
>about having to ship that firmware in non-free, I suspect this is
>little-known.)
OK.
--
Steve McIntyre, Cambridge, UK. steve@einval.com
"Yes, of course duct tape works in a near-vacuum. Duct tape works
anywhere. Duct tape is magic and should be worshipped."
-― Andy Weir, "The Martian"
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