On Wed, 2021-01-13 at 17:24 -0500, John Scott wrote: > > We don't ship udebs for firmware. So please discuss first how this > > s[h]ould work > > I presumed a udeb was necessary for it to be usable during installation. If > it's not needed, that's good to hear and I guess I'll hold off. > > If that's because the ordinary .deb is suitable (it conforms to udeb > requirements), I wonder what my next steps are to see it incorporated in the > installation images. Free firmware should be packaged in udebs so we can integrate it into the installer. However, most firmware that may be useful in the installer is non-free and has to be kept separate from the official images. So the installer doesn't currently have any provision for finding and installing firmware from udebs. We recently added a udeb for wireless-regdb, which contains a file that the kernel loads in the same way as firmware. We ended up putting it in the installer initramfs, so that it's always present. We could do the same for free firmware blobs, but we really shouldn't be adding large files to the initramfs unless we have to. Both wireless-regdb and the ath9k free firmware are useless without nic- wireless-modules-di (udeb for wifi drivers), and should be installed along with it. The idea I had a while back was that nic-wireless-modules-di should depend on wireless-regdb-udeb, and I think the same would go for the free ath9k firmware udeb. However, currently all the kernel module udebs are generated by kernel-wedge which doesn't allow defining dependencies on other packages. Perhaps you could have a look at kernel-wedge and think of a good way to support declaring such dependencies? Ben. -- Ben Hutchings Design a system any fool can use, and only a fool will want to use it.
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