Re: Changing how we handle non-free firmware
On Tue, 2022-08-23 at 17:31 +0200, Simon Josefsson wrote:
> Antonio Terceiro <terceiro@debian.org> writes:
>
> > On Tue, Aug 23, 2022 at 10:53:46AM +0200, Simon Josefsson wrote:
> > > "Andrew M.A. Cater" <amacater@einval.com> writes:
> > >
> > > > In practice, the free installer is useless on its own.
> > >
> > > That is not my experience -- I'm using Debian through its installer on a
> > > number of laptops, desktops and servers, and for my purposes it works
> > > fine and in general I have not needed to enable non-free/contrib for
> > > hardware support.
> >
> > That's very interesting. Can you share the spec for those machines, and
> > if possible point to where they can be bought?
>
> I use Dell R630 servers,
>From 2014 according to
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_PowerEdge_servers#Generation_13
> Talos II workstation,
I'm not sure how old these are, but they are really expensive and seem
to have a very small userbase.
> HP ProLiant ML310e small server,
The CPU is from 2011 according
to https://ark.intel.com/content/www/de/de/ark/products/52269/intel-xeon-processor-e31220-8m-cache-3-10-ghz.html
(I took the CPU from
https://www.reichelt.de/de/de/hp-proliant-ml310e-gen8-v2-server-1-wahl-hp-pl-ml310e-p331526.html?r=1)
> and Lenovo X200/X201 laptops. Yeah the laptop is 10+ years old,
> but to be honest every time I try a modern laptop I don't notice any
> real difference except fancier display and longer battery life, neither
> of which I find important.
>
> Yes I am aware that I can install non-free firmware on the R630, but for
> my purposes (VM host, CI/CD, fuzzing, crypto/math computations) they do
> more harm than good so I chose not to.
I don't think everyone can affort the energy (in)efficiency of a decade
old hardware. Most users will also have more recent hardware; I don't
know much 10+ years hardware still in productive use...
Either way, such ancient hardware is probably not a good example for
the firmware problem: it was a significantly smaller problem back then.
Ansgar
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