On Thursday, December 8, 2022, 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 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.
Adam Williamson Fedora QA IRC: adamw | Twitter: adamw_ha https://www.happyassassin.net
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On Thu, Dec 08, 2022 at 07:59:20PM +0100, drago01 wrote:
On Thursday, December 8, 2022, 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 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.
Please bear in mind the difference between bare metal and virtual machines. The bare metal machine may have 32 GB of RAM, making a 800 MB install image a non-issue. For a public cloud virtual machine though, this could bump your VM sizing up 1 level from 2 GB quota to a 4 GB RAM quota, with correspondingly higher price point. Now most people probably don't run the installer in a public cloud, preferring pre-built disk images. Even in a local machine though, you may be using most of your 32 GB of RAM for other things (well firefox/chrome), so allowing extra for the VM is not without resource cost. If we could figure out a way to knock a few 100 MB off the installer RAM requirements that is valuable.
With regards, Daniel
On Thursday, December 8, 2022, Daniel P. Berrangé berrange@redhat.com wrote:
On Thu, Dec 08, 2022 at 07:59:20PM +0100, drago01 wrote:
On Thursday, December 8, 2022, 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 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.
Please bear in mind the difference between bare metal and virtual machines. The bare metal machine may have 32 GB of RAM, making a 800 MB install image a non-issue. For a public cloud virtual machine though, this could bump your VM sizing up 1 level from 2 GB quota to a 4 GB RAM quota, with correspondingly higher price point. Now most people probably don't run the installer in a public cloud, preferring pre-built disk images. Even in a local machine though, you may be using most of your 32 GB of RAM for other things (well firefox/chrome), so allowing extra for the VM is not without resource cost. If we could figure out a way to knock a few 100 MB off the installer RAM requirements that is valuable.
The problem I see here is not the presence of the firmware on the image, but the fact that it seems to be loaded into memory despite not being used.
With regards, Daniel -- |: https://berrange.com -o- https://www.flickr.com/photos/ dberrange :| |: https://libvirt.org -o- https://fstop138.berrange.com :| |: https://entangle-photo.org -o- https://www.instagram.com/ dberrange :| _______________________________________________ kernel mailing list -- kernel@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe send an email to kernel-leave@lists.fedoraproject.org Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject. org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/kernel@ lists.fedoraproject.org Do not reply to spam, report it: https://pagure.io/fedora- infrastructure/new_issue
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Daniel P. Berrangé -
drago01