On Thu, 2022-12-08 at 16:51 +0000, Gary Buhrmaster wrote:
On Thu, Dec 8, 2022 at 12:58 PM Peter Robinson
<pbrobinson(a)gmail.com> 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.
Does compressing the firmware using zstd (perhaps
at an aggressive level) level help at all?
It already *is* compressed, which is why it doesn't get any smaller in
the compressed filesystem image, unlike the other things I mentioned.
Check for yourself - look under /lib/firmware and you'll see only
things ending in .xz.
--
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA
IRC: adamw | Twitter: adamw_ha
https://www.happyassassin.net