Re: systemd woes continue
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
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