On Sat, 17 Aug 2019 05:10:09 +0200, Stefan Brüns wrote:
On Samstag, 17. August 2019 04:12:41 CEST Larry Finger wrote:
On 8/16/19 12:57 PM, Takashi Iwai wrote:
On Fri, 16 Aug 2019 17:53:23 +0200,
Michal Suchánek wrote:
On Fri, 16 Aug 2019 16:50:53 +0200
Takashi Iwai <tiwai@suse.de> wrote: [...]
How many packages are used for wifi firmware?
If this firmware is missing for a new wireless NIC, then recovery is not trivial.
The assertion made earlier was that modern, cheap USB wireless devices do not need external firmware. That does not match my experience. Of all the wireless devices that I have, only wireless G devices do not need external firmware, and I doubt that people are buying these for emergency backup.
Reinserting the quote:
(And how often does it happen nowadays? Most of cheap USB network devices run fine without firmware...)
^ Wired ethernet.
The same is also true for any Android phone in tethering mode.
The biggest offender for wifi firmware size probably is iwlwifi which is 106 MByte currently, b43 and rtlwifi are both ~1 MByte each.
Yes, and I believe iwlwifi can be excluded from the mandatory list. That is, we may pick up the firmware files for USB ethernet / wifi devices that are needed "to be safe". The Realtek are fairly small (750K compressed), and Atheros are small except for ath10k. We may split ath10k out of atheros subpkg, as ath10k is PCI-only. Mediatek is also not big (1.4M). Broadcom is only about brcmfmac, and b43 isn't included in the standard kernel-firmware package. Some USB WiFi and Ethernet firmware are currently in network and platform subpackages, and these may be moved into a new usb-network subpackage, for example. Then the biggest remaining is Marvell, mostly about mwifiex. It has a USB variant, so this needs to be included. thanks, Takashi -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-kernel+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-kernel+owner@opensuse.org