Also trying to answer the questions of Juerg which all were good ones. > Why is the size problematic?
On one hand the derivative bugs Rolf already quoted like bug 1951422 and bug 1951423. But disk space is only a small aspect of it as of today IMHO. Where density matters (virtual systems) firmware isn't needed and not installed by default. What is left are a few very limited environments, but for those it can be a problem. In my personal opinion a huge portion that bugs me about it is just download size. Sure my and many peoples connection easily gets that done. But on one hand, there are many others as well. And further anything transported over the net consumes energy with all its derivative impact to cause potential pollution. All that would be and is fine when it is about things all or at least most people use. But as the bug here already stated, as of today (it is no more 1G as it was in jammy, but about half of it nowadays at 461M) a lot in there still is unused by most. So I'd think while not a mandatory change or being broken, the motivation to ask for this is and was strong. > And how do you define less common HW? Where do you draw the line? Some HW > might not be common > for you but is for others. I'm sympathetic to the request but it's not > trivial to find the > right balance without upsetting/breaking existing users. I agree and think that this is the more important question. But at the end of the day, isn't that the same as the "which additional drivers should we install" question? Any mechanism that learned which driver to install (which isn't there for all, but for some) could implicitly solve the issue here as well. By either directly pulling the respective firmware in or by the only driver packages selected depending on them. I know it isn't in the best state right now to just add more features, but that could that be an evolution of e.g. ubuntu-drivers? And once it happened then allow you to split the firmware package without reducing the experience of people with less common hardware? --- BTW - Seeing the 461 MB download in Noble today not only made me find and chime in on that bug. I also was just curious how that is divided between manufacturers and devices. Maybe that would help to identify a few big-impact cases to consider (the rest likely is in the KBs and no one bothers). Just like initially netronome was suggested to weight 150mb ... (now down to 5M btw). A few minutes of wrestling with my commandline it gave me this for all categories that sum up above 10M in Noble: 77 MiB in 34 files in mrvl 76 MiB in 68 files in mellanox 59 MiB in 139 files in iwlwifi 58 MiB in 102 files in qcom 39 MiB in 441 files in nvidia 21 MiB in 591 files in amdgpu 21 MiB in 166 files in intel 14 MiB in 85 files in ath11k 13 MiB in 72 files in mediatek 10 MiB in 20 files in qed And from here on one can make the argument both ways... While on one hand there is always a chance, for a device being around. For example just two weeks ago I was happy to easily get a weird old wireless adapter to work in a friends laptop thanks to just having all these :-/ So I think the case is not as trivial as "remove them all and only ship the very free", but then it isn't my deepest expertise area. And that is why the detection and installation on demand might be wanted over just splitting and not installing most. But on the other hand the reason to demand that seems valid to me as well. - Laptops likely have not much mellanox or qcom devices. - And Servers likely have no mrvl, iwlwifi, ath11k, mediatek wifi modules. - And for GPUs in most cases a system would have one but not the other. Therefore those would usually just go unused. I'm aware that I do not have the perfect solution, but wanted report a bit what I saw as the current state and suggested "detect and install" as a compromise between the have-all / have-almost-none states. -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1958518 Title: split some large, lesser-used firmware files into -extra package To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux-firmware/+bug/1958518/+subscriptions -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
