Bug#1039872: Improve firmware package inclusion
On Thu, Jun 29, 2023 at 06:17:49AM +0100, Steve McIntyre wrote:
>Package: debian-installer
>Severity: normal
>
>As mentioned in #1038440 and elsewhere, some of our media builds are
>too big and this is mostly due to inclusion of firmware packages. Some
>growth is not unexpected, but we're including firmware packages that
>are not useful, e.g.:
>
> * nvidia firmware packages from the nvidia-graphics-drivers* source
> package are not useful without non-free drivers that we're not
> shipping in our images
> (https://lists.debian.org/debian-boot/2023/01/msg00157.html)
> * we're currently including raspi-firmware for all arches, while it's
> only useful for arm*
>
>I think we could really do with some extra metadata for the firmware
>packages to help us determine what to include on media. Maybe:
>
> * "this firmware works/does not work with free drivers in Debian"
> * "this is generic firmware, useful for all arches"
> * "this firmware is useful for arches <<foo, bar, baz>> only"
>
>What other information would be helpful?
>
>In the meantime, I'm about to add support for firmware-ignore list(s)
>in debian-cd.
And I've just pushed that into unstable now - see commit
1824a6693304cd8923da288610c378b6b18ed62a . The difference is clear,
comparing amd64 trixie netinst images:
before:
-rw-r--r-- 1 debian-cd debian-cd 788529152 Jul 4 15:14 sid_d-i/20230704-5/amd64/iso-cd/debian-testing-amd64-netinst.iso
after:
-rw-r--r-- 1 debian-cd debian-cd 673185792 Jul 4 17:05 sid_d-i/20230704-6/amd64/iso-cd/debian-testing-amd64-netinst.iso
I think that's quite a result! Comparing the ISOs, the differences are
just 5 missing firmware debs:
firmware-nvidia-gsp_525.116.04-1_amd64.deb
firmware-nvidia-tesla-gsp_525.105.17-2_amd64.deb
firmware-qcom-soc_20230515-2_all.deb
firmware-samsung_20230515-2_all.deb
raspi-firmware_1.20220830+ds-1_all.deb
--
Steve McIntyre, Cambridge, UK. steve@einval.com
Who needs computer imagery when you've got Brian Blessed?
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