On Thu, 2022-12-08 at 19:59 +0100, drago01 wrote:
On Thursday, December 8, 2022, Adam Williamson
<adamwill(a)fedoraproject.org>
wrote:
> On Thu, 2022-12-08 at 12:58 +0000, Peter Robinson wrote:
> >
> > I've done a few passes, dropping a bunch of older firmware upstream
> > that are no longer supported in any stable kernel release, also a
> > bunch of de-dupe and linking of files rather than shipping of multiple
> > copies of the same firmware. It's improved things a bit, unfortunately
> > a lot of the dead firmware was tiny compared to say average modern
> > devices like GPUs or WiFI.
> >
> > The problem with a lot of the firmware, and with the new nvidia "open
> > driver" which shoves a lot of stuff into firmware in order to have an
> > upstreamable driver apparently the firmwares there are going to be
> > 30+Mb each, is that they're needed to bring up graphics/network etc to
> > even just install so I don't know how we can get around this and still
> > have a device work enough to be able to install the needed firmware
> > across the network.
> >
> > Ideas on how to solve that problem welcome.
>
> Sorry if this is way off, but - do we need the GPU firmwares to run a
> graphical install on the fallback path, just using the framebuffer set
> up by the firmware? How crazy would it be to just do that - ship the
> installer env with no GPU firmware?
That would be very crazy, as you will have a degraded user experience
(laggy UI, wrong resolution, ...) to save a couple of megabytes that are a
non issue for today's hardware.
I mean, the modern systems that *need* GPU firmware generally seem to
do pretty well with using native resolution and don't perform too
badly, especially in the simple installer UI. When I test the fallback
path on my bare metal test box on UEFI it uses the monitor's native
resolution and performs fine (even, honestly, in GNOME), and that
motherboard is nearly a decade old even. Don't know if this is the same
for everyone, of course.
--
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA
IRC: adamw | Twitter: adamw_ha
https://www.happyassassin.net