On Sat, 17 Aug 2019 04:12:41 +0200, 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:
You can manually do it without supplement tables. Remove firmware you don't want, lock it, done.
And how can a novice user know which firmware file, and more important,y which corresponding kernel-firmware-xxx package is required and which not? The manual inspection isn't always trivial.
That's where I see room for improvement. Providing commandline tool that does the inspection would be nice.
Yes, such a helper would be needed if we'd go for other than install-recommends. The modalias implementation was taken just because "it works now as-is".
Does not need to be integrated into the installer, either. It's not like a freshly installed system is supposed to be so tight on disk space that a few hundred MB extra firmware files won't fit.
I can't agree with that; a few hundreds MB is a few hundreds MB, not a nut. It's still huge.
And, comparing with other distros regarding this area (storage saving), I'm afraid that we are pretty much behind them.
That's where a firmware cleanup tool comes in. If space is a concern you can do it. If not you need not be bothered.
I think the "cleanup" approach is rather dangerous. It may remove too much if it doesn't know what is actually needed. For example, not all modules show the firmware information, and if we do get rid of all unneeded files, such hidden requirement might be gone unexpectedly. A manual package lock might work, but it's too ugly.
OTOH, the do-install-what-you-want approach won't remove anything unexpectedly. The drawback, of course, is that it might miss something. But you can install in addition manually but without lock.
It can be integrated into yast and whatnot if the interface is sane and there is user demand for the feature.
Right, the tooling is needed and it's missing. That's the reason I still keep the manual modalias in the new kernel-firmware package *FOR NOW*. That is, the modalias stuff may be dropped later once when other better way is provided.
Takashi,
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.
Hm, then maybe we can add USB WiFi firmware to laptop or such patterns as Recommends. Currently I've split per vendor and/or functionality, e.g. kernel-firmware-atheros, kernel-firmware-iwlwifi, kernel-firmware-realtek, etc. Each package size is as below: kernel-firmware-amdgpu 5.9M kernel-firmware-atheros 6.1M kernel-firmware-bluetooth 3.5M kernel-firmware-bnx2 9.4M kernel-firmware-brcm 8.8M kernel-firmware-chelsio 2.7M kernel-firmware-dpaa2 1.9M kernel-firmware-i915 1.3M kernel-firmware-intel 2.4M kernel-firmware-iwlwifi 22M kernel-firmware-liquidio 16M kernel-firmware-marvell 7.4M kernel-firmware-media 3.1M kernel-firmware-mediatek 1.4M kernel-firmware-mellanox 6.3M kernel-firmware-network 3.3M kernel-firmware-nfp 4.4M kernel-firmware-nvidia 737K kernel-firmware-platform 1.0M kernel-firmware-qlogic 11M kernel-firmware-radeon 2.3M kernel-firmware-realtek 750K kernel-firmware-serial 383K kernel-firmware-sound 2.9M kernel-firmware-ti 4.3M kernel-firmware-ueagle 786K The realtek one is pretty small (750KB) while iwlwifi is very large (22MB) and atheros is a bit largish (6MB). Also network subpkg might be wroth for default. Of course, it's possible to split / re-group some entities. thanks, Takashi -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-kernel+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-kernel+owner@opensuse.org