Re: Dealing with drivers that need firmware on the filesystem
On Wed, 12 Jan 2005 01:57:08 -0600, Manoj Srivastava
<srivasta@debian.org> wrote:
[snip]
> Software that resides on disk, however, lives on our side of
> the divide; the kernel, and the filesystem drivers are required to
> mediate delivery of this non-free payload to the system, and it can't
> just be considered, in my opinion, just part of the hardware platform
> on which Debian runs (albeit a part of the platform that is
> software).
Do you think it would be tolerable to exclude non-free firmware images
from the kernel binary and modules themselves but to permit loading
them from the initrd or the root filesystem? I. e., treat the
firmware download function of a driver as more or less incidental, put
the non-free firmware in non-free where it belongs, and not force
drivers to bounce back and forth between main and contrib depending on
whether there happens to be a working-firmware-in-flash version of the
hardware they support on the market at a given time?
Cheers,
- Michael
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