On Wed, Jul 17, 2019 at 03:16:09PM +0200, Frank Scheiner wrote: > To sum things up: what Adrian intends to do for Alpha - pre-include the > firmware on the installer discs - seems to be the only way to get this > problem fixed w/o manual intervention during installation.
Many other things to comment on in this thread, but not much time to do so at the moment. I *did* want to comment on the above... It more than likely would be completely against Debian policy/guidelines to do so, but the best *technical* solution to the qlogic firmware issue on Alpha is to build the firmware into the kernel along with the driver. That is how it was done for older Debian releases (and other distros) before kernel developers adopted the default position of NOT building the firmware into the kernel. The fact that the firmware is non-free from a licensing perspective only made matters worse. As a side-note, if you build your own kernel from source and build-in a driver (rather than build it as a module) that requires firmware, you *have* to include the firmware in the kernel as well -- the kernel configurator neither detects nor enforces inclusion of the corresponding firmware -- you have to manually specify you want that done. My custom kernels have all the drivers for hardware that's present and required at boot time built-in to the kernel, along with the required firmware. For the Miata platform I use (PWS 433au), the two affected drivers are for the qlogic SCSI card and the Radeon-based graphics card. Things get complicated in a hurry when required drivers are built as modules if the firmware isn't available when the hardware gets auto- detected and the module gets loaded. As one person in this thread already observed, one workaround is to blacklist the driver module to prevent it from being loaded until the firmware can somehow be made available -- a less than satisfactory solution because the driver must then be loaded manually -- definitely not user-friendly in any sense of the phrase. To summarize... If *I* were trying to put together an installer image for the Alpha platform, it would include drivers for the default disk controllers for each Alpha variant, drivers for the standard DEC video cards, and drivers for the commonly-used Radeon cards that seem to be the agreed-upon upgrade used by the Alpha community. I'm not familiar with Alpha platforms other than the one I use (Miata), but I think it would be helpful/useful for us to put together a list of disk controller and video drivers that might reasonably be needed in an installer image. This would help Adrian get the Debian installer where it needs to be in fewer iterations. Respectfully, --Bob