Debian and firmware • Hacker News Board

Re: Debian and firmware

#101

Post by pabs3 » Tue, Apr 19, 2022, 9:25 AM UTC

denton-scratch wrote: post #97

throwaway48375 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want non-free software. I don't find other distros nicer to use. I chose a distribution whose values aligned with mine. I have switched before and will, admittedly reluctantly, change again to find one whose principals align with mine. I find Debian, as it exists now, the correct balance of ease of use while still respecting my ideals.

I line-up with Debian's principled stand against non-free blobs. Having said that, my reason for preferring firmware freedom mainly isn't principle; it's that non-free firmware potentially deprives me of control of my own equipment. By turning it's nose up at non-free firmware, Debian increases incentives for people to buy equipment that depends less on these blobs. That in turn incentivises manufacturers to offer eq…

The problem is that freedom respecting hardware pretty much doesn't exist if you are buying the latest generation of hardware from popular vendors. Even if you are willing to go outside of x86, even the latest generation of OpenPOWER requires blobs.

Re: Debian and firmware

#102

Post by jcelerier » Tue, Apr 19, 2022, 9:27 AM UTC

maratc wrote: post #95

jcelerier wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The engineering school I went to used Debian on every desktop

Was it because of the principals of your school?

I have no idea but it stayed through many staff changes. The university I went to next (U. Bordeaux, ~50k students) 's comp. sci. department computers were also running Debian iirc.

Re: Debian and firmware

#103

Post by maratc » Tue, Apr 19, 2022, 9:34 AM UTC

jcelerier wrote: post #102

maratc wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was it because of the principals of your school?

I have no idea but it stayed through many staff changes. The university I went to next (U. Bordeaux, ~50k students) 's comp. sci. department computers were also running Debian iirc.

It wasn't a question per se, but rather a lazy joke at people sometimes misspelling "principles" as "principals" :)

Re: Debian and firmware

#104

Post by jabl » Tue, Apr 19, 2022, 10:05 AM UTC

denton-scratch wrote: post #99

bruce511 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The purpose is to provide free software _for those who want it_. If the goal is to create converts then a puritanical approach is a poor approach, IMO. Personally I've never seen the FSF approach as being "conversional" - rather it acts as a purity touchstone. Debian needs to articulate its specific goals to the author, there are many paths they can take, but unless the goals are clearly articulated its hard to see w…

I don't think Debian needs "converts". This isn't a religious revival movement. There are many Debian derivatives that aren't as arsey as Debian about non-free blobs; if that's what people want, then they should "convert" to one of those derivatives, rather than raw Debian.

One could just as well claim that if Debian decides to include non-free firmware on the official install images, those that are deeply offended about that can sod off and create some derivative distro with the dirty bits removed. It's not written in stone that Debian has to be the purest distro of them all.

Re: Debian and firmware

#105

Post by Neuroncrm » Tue, Apr 19, 2022, 10:09 AM UTC

No post body was provided.

Re: Debian and firmware

#106

Post by fxtentacle » Tue, Apr 19, 2022, 10:16 AM UTC

mschuster91 wrote: post #91

fxtentacle wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe there should be an official non-free repository (akin to Ubuntu's) which users can enable offline, meaning it needs to be stored on the official CD. Enabling it should display a big scary warning about handing over partial control of your machine to greedy faceless megacorps who will throw you under the bus in a heartbeat if that makes them money. Maybe add an illustration of a robot terminator, to really d…

I get the trouble for networking chipsets, but not for the video card - all x86 systems should be able to fall back to ye goode olde days of at least a text console using the old BIOS interface. A default setup of any Linux distribution should in my opinion at least automatically detect if there is something lacking for a framebuffer console or a GUI, and fall back to a plain console.

You're correct, there might be a text-mode fallback. It's just that it is effectively useless for me. If I don't have network access, how am I going to install the firmware for the network card?

That's why I believe the most common firmware .deb packages should be cached during installation so that they are on-disk in case they are needed.

Re: Debian and firmware

#107

Post by pid-1 » Tue, Apr 19, 2022, 10:31 AM UTC

diffeomorphism wrote: post #37

mastax wrote: post #6

Almost every hardware device has one or more CPUs on it. As Foone joked, "USB is a standard to let you connect 8051 microcontrollers to PCs." Given the choice between burned-in firmware and externally-loaded firmware, the latter seems clearly superior from an openness perspective. The firmware binary and the loading mechanism opens up the opportunity for reverse engineering, modification, and replacement open firmwar…

> if that policy were successful at promoting. Not disagreeing that policies should be made with success in mind. But by the same reasoning "vegan" should include the top 5 most popular meat dishes as exceptions. This would easily make it more popular, more accessible and probably much more successful at reducing meat usage over all. The issue is that the definition of "success" might be entirely unacceptable. Just l…

That's what I did.

The first time I tried becoming vegetarian I failed. I often had no reasonable options in restaurants nor social events. Also I live in a country where meat is cheap and barbecues are a key social activity.

Nowadays I still eat meat 0-2 times per week when my choices are limited, but that's much better than eating 14 times per week.

Re: Debian and firmware

#108

Post by tremon » Tue, Apr 19, 2022, 10:33 AM UTC

mschuster91 wrote: post #91

fxtentacle wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe there should be an official non-free repository (akin to Ubuntu's) which users can enable offline, meaning it needs to be stored on the official CD. Enabling it should display a big scary warning about handing over partial control of your machine to greedy faceless megacorps who will throw you under the bus in a heartbeat if that makes them money. Maybe add an illustration of a robot terminator, to really d…

I get the trouble for networking chipsets, but not for the video card - all x86 systems should be able to fall back to ye goode olde days of at least a text console using the old BIOS interface. A default setup of any Linux distribution should in my opinion at least automatically detect if there is something lacking for a framebuffer console or a GUI, and fall back to a plain console.

This isn't what the radeon driver does for AMD gpu's, and hasn't for years: loading the driver automatically enables the full rendering engine and disables the VESA modes, even if no firmware has been loaded. Which means that on a normal system with radeon.ko present but not the firmware files, you get a few seconds of kernel output followed by a black screen. For the systems where I don't want the firmware (servers), I must be very careful to blacklist the radeon driver or I completely lose the local console.

This has been the case since the SI chipsets in 2012. I'm not sure if the fault lies fully with the driver, maybe the hardware doesn't allow querying the state of the engine firmware before enabling the engine.

Re: Debian and firmware

#109

Post by scbrg » Tue, Apr 19, 2022, 10:38 AM UTC

rincebrain wrote: post #68

zrm wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Debian is one of the top Linux distributions, so there are empirically a large number of people not being deterred. And many of the other top Linux distributions are Debian derivatives which both participate in the community and provide the alternate experience. Upholding its principles is the way Debian distinguishes itself. If you don't like it, use Mint or something.

I think the question becomes, are people using Debian in large part because of those principles, or in spite of the inconveniences that come with them because of other benefits (e.g. it's a fairly well-maintained, stable Linux distribution, that very aggressively believes if something worked on 11.0 it better still work on 11.9)? If we look at popcon[1], it currently says 11.84% of users who opted into popcon regular…

Speaking as someone who is part of this "significant percentage of Debian users", I'd like to point out that opting in is the key part in the phrase "happily opting into".

I've made a conscious choice to install the non free packages. I'm quite happy I had that choice, but I'm even happier that they weren't forced on me.

I certainly hope nobody will point to me and say "look here, non-free should obviously be the default!"

Re: Debian and firmware

#110

Post by michaelmrose » Tue, Apr 19, 2022, 10:49 AM UTC

bruce511 wrote: post #84

jyrkesh wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Switched to Windows server (and was blown away by how polished that was, but that's another story.) Have you told this story anywhere else already? I'd love to read it. In a past life I worked very close to Windows Server, but I mostly selfhost Linux at home now. What is it mostly identity related? I miss AD sometimes...or maybe storage? The SMB stack is pretty good too.

I haven't. I had set up the machine with 2 large spindle drives, 2 large SSDs, and a separate SSD for the OS. after booting windows looked at the disk layout and asked me what I planned to do. It suggested some quick options, one of which was exactly what I planned to do (raid the spindle pair, and raid the SSD pair) and one even better (create a volume putting the SSD and spindle together, and then raid that.) Yes t…

If I recall correctly Fedora in the 2003 - 2006 era included an option to set up raid as part of the standard installer. Around the same time frame gnomes disk tool supported actually doing operations like replacing a disk in that array.

Even the incantation to do it manually isn't that magic. I'm guessing you could read the manual for the options to mdadm --create in minuted rather than days. If you want to be really fancy zpool create mirror foo mirror bar.