#1039872 Improve firmware package inclusion

Package:
debian-installer
Source:
debian-installer
Description:
Debian Installer documentation
Submitter:
Steve McIntyre
Date:
2023-07-05 16:57:03 UTC
Severity:
normal
#1039872#5
Date:
2023-06-29 05:17:49 UTC
From:
To:
As mentioned in #1038440 and elsewhere, some of our media builds are
too big and this is mostly due to inclusion of firmware packages. Some
growth is not unexpected, but we're including firmware packages that
are not useful, e.g.:

 * nvidia firmware packages from the nvidia-graphics-drivers* source
   package are not useful without non-free drivers that we're not
   shipping in our images
   (https://lists.debian.org/debian-boot/2023/01/msg00157.html)
 * we're currently including raspi-firmware for all arches, while it's
   only useful for arm*

I think we could really do with some extra metadata for the firmware
packages to help us determine what to include on media. Maybe:

 * "this firmware works/does not work with free drivers in Debian"
 * "this is generic firmware, useful for all arches"
 * "this firmware is useful for arches <<foo, bar, baz>> only"

What other information would be helpful?

In the meantime, I'm about to add support for firmware-ignore list(s)
in debian-cd.
#1039872#10
Date:
2023-07-04 22:50:09 UTC
From:
To:
And I've just pushed that into unstable now - see commit
1824a6693304cd8923da288610c378b6b18ed62a . The difference is clear,
comparing amd64 trixie netinst images:

before:
-rw-r--r-- 1 debian-cd debian-cd 788529152 Jul  4 15:14 sid_d-i/20230704-5/amd64/iso-cd/debian-testing-amd64-netinst.iso

after:
-rw-r--r-- 1 debian-cd debian-cd 673185792 Jul  4 17:05 sid_d-i/20230704-6/amd64/iso-cd/debian-testing-amd64-netinst.iso

I think that's quite a result! Comparing the ISOs, the differences are
just 5 missing firmware debs:

firmware-nvidia-gsp_525.116.04-1_amd64.deb
firmware-nvidia-tesla-gsp_525.105.17-2_amd64.deb
firmware-qcom-soc_20230515-2_all.deb
firmware-samsung_20230515-2_all.deb
raspi-firmware_1.20220830+ds-1_all.deb
#1039872#15
Date:
2023-07-05 06:30:03 UTC
From:
To:
As mentioned in #1032071, AFAICS firmware-ti-connectivity also contains
ARM-only firmware.
#1039872#20
Date:
2023-07-05 15:55:48 UTC
From:
To:
Hmmm, OK. The description isn't 100% clear here. I'll filter it now
for non-arm as well.
#1039872#25
Date:
2023-07-05 16:52:56 UTC
From:
To:
Indeed. I came to this conclusion after checking that the modules
mentioned in the description were present only in ARM kernel-image packages.