Hello, The general resolutions 2004-003 and 2004-004 in mind, I would like to find a consensus among the kernel-team members on how to deal with binary-only firmware blobs in the kernel, now for sarge, and for later releases.
Bugs like #298743 show we have users needing the currently pruned
drivers, and I need some of them too myself - both for my private boxes,
as well as at my workplace. Having the drivers removed without a
replacement in non-free, like for example custom buildable module
packages and udebs to be loaded at installation time, is a not tolerable
situation.
If you have a closer look at the kernel-sources we distribute, only a
few binary firmware drivers are removed at all. The dri modules for
radeon and mga, the advansys scsi driver, soundblaster 16 and many more
drivers with binary firmware are still in place. Even questionable
examples like the intel e100 driver, which applies a small (binary)
patch to the firmware at initialization time.
In my opinion, this situation is discriminatory against users who want
to run Debian on a system containing affected hardware.
In short, I would like to propose the following:
1. we remove the pruning from current sarge kernels, and release kernel
sources complete with all drivers as distributed on kernel.org
2. we agree on how to handle binary firmware in future releases,
in the light of GR 2004-004:
a. we move the kernel to non-free
b. we split the kernel-source package in a dfsg-free and a non-free
one.
Implementing userspace firmware loading is a long-term perspective, but
out of discussion for sarge. We need a short-term solution, until the
binary firmware problem is solved in agreement with upstream.
Regarding 2b: I have started packaging some of the pruned modules in
the need of udebs containing qlogic and acenic drivers at installation
time, which could be extended to handle all pruned kernel modules.
I will commit the sources as a starting proposal if we agree to go this
way.
Kind regards
Frederik Schueler
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