On Fri, 2020-12-04 at 22:08 +0100, Holger Wansing wrote: [...] While debugging this, I found that the "radeon" module - responsible for this graphics card - is not included in the installer environment.
So, the kernel cannot load it when detecting the graphics card. And because of that, the "check-missing-firmware" mechanism does not get notified about missing firmware. Is this intended this way? On most architectures, the installer can use generic framebuffer drivers (VGA, EFI, OpenFirware, or simple-framebuffer) as it does not require high performance. Adding hardware-specific graphics drivers would probably increase its size and memory requirements significantly. (I was stumbling about the radeon module here, but apparently it's the same for other graphic cards too, like Intel? I don't find any video-output kernel modules at all in d-i environment ...) Would adding such graphics modules to the installer cause any harm? Or could they be added, and get such problems sorted out? Adding those drivers just to trigger firmware installation seems like a silly thing to do. It wouldn't fix the issue in radeon or amdgpu, because they don't have a working fallback for missing firmware. (Debian carries a patch to make sure they abort probing early if it's not installed. So this wouldn't cause a regression but it wouldn't log the usual "missing firmware" message.) Could this not be done in "discover"? If it can match PCI devices with a specific class and vendor, that should be enough to decide that firmware-amd-graphics (AMD, ATI) or firmware-misc-nonfree (Intel, Nvidia) might be wanted. Ben. > Sorry, if I got something completely wrong here ... -- Ben Hutchings Lowery's Law: If it jams, force it. If it breaks, it needed replacing anyway.
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