Hello,
I'm actually affected by the call to mountmedia in
check-missing-firmware. Especially by:
"
- Insufficient lookup (something about stopping at the first partition
that's found or something, but I don't know the specifics, and I'm
not diving into what “mountmedia driver” does or should be doing).
"
Indeed on my EFI system, the first partition is the ESP that is FAT type
(/dev/sda1) while the firmwares are on an USB stick that is on /dev/sdc1
(but could also be on /dev/sdd3 or wathever). Since mountmedia will
return true for the first partition that it can mount, in my case it
will only mount /dev/sda1 to /media and stop searching on the other
partitions, even if /dev/sda1 doesn't have the required firmware.
This probably explains why many people are not able to install their
firmware this way.
In my case, the required firmware is for "b43" driver. The problem is
that no package contains the firmware, so it is not available on
bookworm installer medium. Actually Debian has a package that will
download, extract and install the firmware: firmware-b43-installer.
Although the package is available on the installation medium, it is
useless because without b43, no wifi, without wifi there is no internet,
and without internet the installer package is of no use.
I could prepare the b43 firmware files by installing the package another
system and copying them to the USB stick into /firmware/b43 for use on a
system that connects through wifi, but with the bugs of
"check-missing-firmware" script it is not possible to access them. This
leads to some frustration.
Would it be possible to fix the check-missing-firmware script so that it
scans all devices/partitions until it finds the appropriate firmware files?
I also noticed some issues in what is displayed to the user in the
installer (graphical). For example the UI asks for each firmware file if
we want to search for it. Maybe it should ask once for a set of files,
instead of asking for each single file.
My issue is reported also here:
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1088295
The process to load external firmware is already rather complex. I'm not
so in favor of having to complexify it more by creating a cpio archive
to append to init.rd. By the way, one would have then to inject that
into the ISO image?
Regards
Fab
