Re: Dealing with drivers that need firmware on the filesystem

[Matthew Garrett <mgarrett@chiark.greenend.org.uk>]

Sam Couter <sam@couter.dropbear.id.au> wrote:
> Steve McIntyre <steve@einval.com> wrote:
>> Yes, quite a lot actually - we can then ask people to feed a floopy or
>> CD containing the vendor-supplied firmware. Do keep up...
> 
> A floopy?
> 
> Maybe I'm failing to keep up (I've obviously taken a long time to get to
> reading this message), but why can't the driver that requires the
> firmware also be on the floppy or CD in loadable module form? If the
> installer's smart enough to look for firmware it can look for extra
> kernel modules too.

In many cases, the firmware may be provided by the hardware vendor in
some form, so we can just use the existing media for install purposes.
It's probably not reasonable to expect them to provide Debian installer
modules as well, so in some cases we'd end up with twice as many items
of removable media.

-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59-chiark.mail.debian.project@srcf.ucam.org