On Friday, December 9, 2022, Adam Williamson adamwill@fedoraproject.org wrote:
On Fri, 2022-12-09 at 12:04 +0100, Florian Weimer wrote:
- Richard W. M. Jones:
You only need network / wifi firmware blobs (although I'm sure they are in themselves large) and then you can fetch anything else needed for the hardware including graphics, right?
I think you need graphics to set up wifi.
Yeah, this is an awkward chicken-and-egg problem. Even if we assume you're on a wired network, kernel modules generally - AIUI - try to load the firmware once, on initial module load, and if they can't find it, just give up, right? So we still have an ordering problem: how can we delay the loading of modules that need firmware until the network is up for us to be able to access the firmware files?
Maybe I'm missing something that would help there, but it seems tricky...
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.
In terms of what the other big space takers are in general:
- amdgpu/ (AMD video cards) is ~20M
- intel/ (mainly Intel bluetooth) is ~15M [0]
- qed/ (some very high-end QLogic network cards) is ~10M [0]
- i915/ (Intel video firmware) is 8.4M
- mediatek/ is 7.7M [1]
- qcom/ is 7.3M
Then it trails off from there. Just the wifi plus those 6 things are around 170M, so the large majority of all the space taken.
[0] No, we can't lose this - people install with Bluetooth mice/keyboards [1] For a quick win right now possibly we could assume nobody's going to use one of those as the interface for a Fedora install and drop that, not sure if it's a safe assumption
It's not given that AMD wifi is rebranded mediatek, meaning it will drop wifi for lots of newer AMD laptops.
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