Now that we have some time before the next release, I would like to question whether our treatment of firmware is adequate.
In the old days, (most) firmware was in the kernel - and then the licence police took exception to that (and some 'libre' distributions deliberately omit it). Now, most firmware is in linux-firmware, or its upstreams such as Dave Airlie's freedesktop.org page. AFAICS, there are three main users of external firmware: 1. radeon graphics cards, R300 through to Sea Islands [ and probably the newer high-end stuff, amdkfd I think it is called in the kernel - but for the moment that is barely in the kernel and has no Xorg driver ]. The firmware for R200 and earlier is still in the kernel. For these, we cover it in the Xorg ATI video driver (with a link to Dave Airlie's freedesktop page) under 'Kernel configuration for additional firmware'. Please note that nowadays, the kernel default for radeon DRM is with KMS (Kernel ModeSetting) enabled, and for that the firmware is required when the text console tries to move to a framebuffer. Either build it in (slightly quicker if there is a lot of firmware, e.g. my Kaveri uses 9 blobs - building it in means I can see the penguins just before they scroll out, but making it a module and letting it load from /lib/firmware means I never get to see them, and probably miss some of the message. 2. some wired network adaptors, particularly those using the R8169 driver - these are different, the kernel complains if the desired firmware is not found, but they appear to work. Oddly, if I build the driver in, but point to /lib/firmware in the kernel's .config, and put the required item there, it seems to find the firmware (i.e. no message in dmesg). 3. wifi drivers. My netbook uses the brcm/bcm43xx*.fw files. Without these, the wifi cannot be brought up [ that is definitely a BLFS issue, arguably the other two could be seen as part of LFS ]. For all of these, the key thing is to point the kernel's CONFIG_FIRMWARE_DIR to /lib/firmware instead of "firmware" At the moment, we only mention firmware under the Xorg ATI driver. I would like to see it moved to a more general place, perhaps at the end of chapter 3. If we had a firmware page there, it could also cover CPU microcode - if anybody wants to cover that (last time I looked, the latest intel and AMD microcode updates did not apply to my CPUs). But maybe you are all using things which do not need extra firmware :) ĸen -- Nanny Ogg usually went to bed early. After all, she was an old lady. Sometimes she went to bed as early as 6 a.m. -- http://lists.linuxfromscratch.org/listinfo/blfs-dev FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/faq.html Unsubscribe: See the above information page
