On Tue, 17 Jun 2025 at 17:37, Heinrich Schuchardt <heinrich.schuchardt@canonical.com> wrote:
Michael Hudson-Doyle <michael.hudson@canonical.com> schrieb am Di., 17. Juni 2025, 05:37:On Tue, 3 Jun 2025 at 04:05, Juerg Haefliger <juerg.haefliger@canonical.com> wrote: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 sounds like a good plan for me. I've long been a bit agitated about how much of the server installer ISO is taken up by firmware -- it's something on the order of 25% of the total size! (~500MiB out of a total of ~2GiB). Would the server installerOn virtual machines you most probably don't want any firmware. On tiny embeded systems you would only want the strictly necessary firmware.
Neither of those use cases are really in the target zone for the server installer though.
In an installer an advanced user might prefer a choice between firmware for detected hardware and give me all.
I have a very vague notion of making it easier for people to make or at least get installers that are more tailored for their needs (like if you are doing a netboot install you probably don't really want the pool on the install media) but nothing at all concrete there...
be able to get away without the -graphics blobs? (i.e. are systems in practice to operate a vt without any firmware at all?)
Cheers,mwhBoth Ethernet and WiFi have failed for me due to missing firmware.On internal GPUs of ARM and RISC-V SoCs you might not get a usable desktop without firmware.
Yes but for the server installer that's fine I think.
Cheers,
mwh
Best regardsHeinrich--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
--
ubuntu-devel mailing list
ubuntu-devel@lists.ubuntu.com
Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel
ubuntu-devel mailing list
ubuntu-devel@lists.ubuntu.com
Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel
