Bug#991771: debian-installer: firmware support: review/update “6.4.1. Preparing a medium” procedure
Package: debian-installer
Severity: normal
X-Debbugs-Cc: debian-cd@lists.debian.org
A lot of work has happened in the firmware support department for
Bullseye, as documented in #989863. In passing, Steve mentioned the
“download archives of firmware packages” use case that we document in
6.4.1:
https://www.debian.org/releases/bullseye/amd64/ch06s04.en
The code changes implemented to widen firmware detection rely on
supplemental information extracted from DEP-11 metadata, and ship
alongside the included firmware packages, on the debian-cd side,
only when building (unofficial) firmware-enabled images.
To make sure we wouldn't disrupt anything on (official) main-only
images, we shipped those `*.patterns` files in a `dep11` subdir of
the `firmware` directory (again, only for firmware-enabled images).
If we want to make it possible for people to complete their main-only
installation image with files they would download separately, we would
need those files to be shipped somewhere on the installation image,
and/or to update those instructions. This would likely require code
changes in any cases, since hw-detect prompts for extra storage devices
from check-missing-firmware (in case firmware files were spotted as
missing in dmesg), while the extra looking at `.patterns` files was
implemented in the post-base-installer 50install-firmware hook.
This didn't seem to be very high priority, and I didn't make it a
blocker for 11.0; we can brainstorm what use cases we want to support
and how, implement changes in D-I Bookworm Alpha releases, and maybe
cherry-pick results in 11.n.
Cheers,
--
Cyril Brulebois (kibi@debian.org) <https://debamax.com/>
D-I release manager -- Release team member -- Freelance Consultant
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