On Tue, 3 Jun 2025 at 05:43, Heinrich Schuchardt <heinrich.schuchardt@canonical.com> wrote:
Juerg Haefliger <juerg.haefliger@canonical.com> schrieb am Mo., 2. Juni 2025, 18:05:Hi,
linux-firmware is ever growing and I'd like to entertain the thought of
splitting it up. Not as fine grained as Debian but only split out the bigger
GPU blobs (for now):
- linux-firmware (provides the bulk of the blobs)
- linux-<vendor>-graphics (similar to Debian, provides vendor specific
graphics related firmwares)
This obviously can't break users so I'm trying to understand which pieces
need to be updated for seamless release upgrades and new installations. I
think this means that we need to detect what's in the system and install the
relevant linux-<vendor>-graphics package(s). Is this ubuntu-release-upgrader?
subiquity? ubuntu-drivers? All of them? Anything else?
Image generation and seeds would probably be affected by this as well.
Does anyone see any (other) issues with this?
Thanks
...Juerg
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Swapping GPUs and other hardware typically is not synchronized with system installation or upgrades.My hope is that when moving the NVMe with my installed system from one computer to another it still boots into the graphical desktop and has WiFi and Ethernet.Please, consider hardware updates as one of the usage scenarios.
I think the degree we need to worry about this is related to the degree of degradation experienced when the firmware is missing. If the network card is slower or the supported resolution without firmware is lower, I think this is OK as it should be reasonably straightforward to get back to a optimal setup. We don't install the nvidia drivers on all systems "just in case" after all. OTOH, if the experience is no network at all or just a black screen, that's much worse.
I don't have a feel for which of these experiences is more common with missing firmware though.
Cheers,
mwh
Even if linux-firmware were split into multiple smaller binary packages for smaller updates, it might still make sense to install more than is strictly needed for the current hardware.
