• Pulling free firmware-ath9k-htc into the CD images

    From Steve McIntyre@21:1/5 to John Scott on Thu Dec 31 17:00:02 2020
    XPost: linux.debian.maint.boot

    Hey John,

    I hope you had a good Christmas!

    On Wed, Dec 23, 2020 at 12:57:09PM -0500, John Scott wrote:
    On Wednesday, December 23, 2020 9:52:16 AM EST Steve McIntyre wrote:
    Is this just going to be for x86 machines, or is it likely to be useful for >> ~everybody?
    It will be useful for all architectures, except I don't think there are >FreeBSD and Hurd drivers yet, but it's an arch:all package regardless.

    Right. I'm more asking whether it's useful to try and pull this in for
    all arches, or just for amd64 / i386 for now.

    IIRC d-i uses kernel messages to work out what firmware to use. Is the
    kernel driver still going to be looking for the older (non-free) firmware >> still? If so, that should probably be changed.
    Well, the "nonfree" (quotes because I suspect it's built from the same
    free source, but by definition we can't be sure without an identical binary) >firmware currently hijacks the proper name of the firmware. I'd love for
    my package to take it over, but if not a hack could be to set the kernel >option to look for the "development" firmware.

    Hmmm. In that case you'll need to talk to the kernel maintainers here,
    surely? There's not much point having the firmware available if the
    kernel isn't going to look for it AFAICS?

    Ah... It would be more *normal* to ship the source. Is there a reason
    not to?
    Sorry, should've revised my footnote from the mail to the kernel team. None >of the firmware in firmware-free is built from source, and that's what I was >expressing concern to. To the best of my knowledge, this package is the
    first to be built as such. (Given the recent Lenovo discussion on -devel >about having to ship that firmware in non-free, I suspect this is >little-known.)

    OK.

    --
    Steve McIntyre, Cambridge, UK. steve@einval.com "Yes, of course duct tape works in a near-vacuum. Duct tape works
    anywhere. Duct tape is magic and should be worshipped."
    -― Andy Weir, "The Martian"

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  • From John Scott@21:1/5 to Steve McIntyre on Thu Dec 31 19:46:12 2020
    XPost: linux.debian.maint.boot
    Copy: debian-cd@lists.debian.org
    Copy: debian-boot@lists.debian.org

    On Thursday, December 31, 2020 10:53:30 AM EST Steve McIntyre wrote:
    Right. I'm more asking whether it's useful to try and pull this in for
    all arches, or just for amd64 / i386 for now.
    I guess the majority of users are on amd64/i386 systems, but as the firmware
    is for USB devices it would be useful for all of them, including, say, Raspberry Pi users wanting to minimize use of proprietary firmware.

    There's not much point having the firmware available if the
    kernel isn't going to look for it AFAICS?
    Actually with my draft udeb, it just uses the same workaround to find
    the firmware as it does on the installed system, by setting the appropriate option via a modprobe configuration file. It really should be as simple as pulling in the udeb into the images: https://salsa.debian.org/jscott/open-ath9k-htc-firmware

    Assuming the freeze doesn't get in the way, this will probably need to go through NEW and might be able to be merged in that way.
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