Re: Dealing with drivers that need firmware on the filesystem

[Martin Schulze <joey@infodrom.org>]

Matthew Garrett wrote:
> Steve Langasek <vorlon@debian.org> wrote:
> 
> > I don't think I have a problem, conceptually, with a kernel package which
> > provides drivers for 10,000 different types of hardware, and needs to load
> > firmware from disk for 300 of them, being in main (without a
> > Depends:/Recommends: relationship on the firmware-providing packages).
> 
> That doesn't quite solve the problem of drivers outside the main kernel
> tree. This is the case for a large amount of current wireless hardware,
> irritatingly.

If they are not part of the normal kernel, it is easier to decide on a
per-package basis whether the driver is functional without the non-free
blob, and can go into main, or whether it is not, and has to go into
contrib.

The larger problem is to identify non-free blobs in the main kernel,
extract them into non-free and modify the driver so that it is able
to load the blob from a user provided location; and include this in
our installer.

Regards,

	Joey

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