On Thu, Dec 8, 2022 at 4:56 PM Adam Williamson adamwill@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 has crossed my mind, and with simpledrm that may be more straight forward now, but TBH it's not something I am skilled enough to deal with, nor have the resources to test, or actually care enough about, but the big GPU firmwares are now all split out so that should be much more straightforward for someone with the resources to investigate.
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