On Sun, 2022-12-11 at 20:23 +0100, Florian Weimer wrote:
* Kevin Kofler via devel:
> Adam Williamson wrote:
> > Looking at sizes, iwlwifi firmware alone is 75M(!) ath10k is 6.8M,
> > ath11k is 12M, ath6k is 812K, so that's nearly another 20M. brcm/ is
> > another 6.4M and I *think* that's all wifi. There's a few other minor
> > ones, but that's a little over 100M of just wifi, with Intel by a huge
> > margin the worst offender.
> >
> > Does anyone know anyone we can talk to at Intel about this? It's pretty
> > obnoxious.
>
> It's the same situation as for some of the GPU firmwares: They have
> submitted as vendor driver to upstream, which does very little, together
> with a huge proprietary firmware, which does most of the real work. Hardware
> manufacturers love playing that trick.
Uhm, part of the problem is that firmware versions which cannot be
loaded by the kernel are not removed upstream, or in the linux-firmware
package. The wifi firmware file I use is just 450 KiB compressed, but
that turns into 6.8 MiB compressed due to this kind of near-duplication.
Unfortunately, I don't see an easy way to discover which firmware files
the kernel can ever load.
I'm working on this with Peter and the Intel firmware folks ATM.
There's a PR at
https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/linux-firmware/pull-request/9 , and
Intel folks seem receptive to the idea of removing at least some of the
older ones upstream too.
--
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA
IRC: adamw | Twitter: adamw_ha
https://www.happyassassin.net