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Debian and firmware

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Re: Debian and firmware

#161

Post by dralley »

thrown12 wrote: post #18
cube00 wrote: post #2

As bad as it is in the short term the only way we'll see long term change is to keep the friction on. It's this friction that forces the change of habit to support manufacturers who open their firmware. If it's seamless then there's no incentive to seek out the open option next time you buy. In my personal case nVidia stopped supporting my graphics card and eventually their binary blob stopped working with the newer…

>As bad as it is in the short term the only way we'll see long term change is to keep the friction on. It's this friction that forces the change of habit to support manufacturers who open their firmware. If it's seamless then there's no incentive to seek out the open option next time you buy. The only friction you're causing is to Debian users. My current laptop is Arch after 5 laptops that ran Debian. My Debian desk…

I doubt that has anything to do with "friction", Debian's release cycle just isn't compatible with wanting to run new hardware. Drivers are distributed via the kernel, Debian uses old kernels and can't afford to do the same kind of hardware enablement backports that Red Hat, SUSE and Canonical can do, so being stuck with the old kernel means poor support for brand new hardware.

Re: Debian and firmware

#162

Post by josteink »

cesarb wrote: post #122
apatheticonion wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is great context, this only threw me because when I installed Debian and some other distros, I didn't have any graphics card drivers and was confused why and how to get them. > Because AMD have spent a lot of time and effort getting the drivers in the kernel Does that mean the drivers are open source? > It is a lot more simple. It is all built in. When it works. When you have no context (like me) and you are pre…

> Does that mean the drivers are open source? Yes, they are. Of the big three (Intel, AMD, Nvidia), only the Nvidia drivers aren't open source (there's an open source driver for Nvidia, called "nouveau", but it doesn't come from the manufacturer and isn't that good).

> there's an open source driver for Nvidia, called "nouveau", but it doesn't come from the manufacturer and isn't that good

Define good?

I’m not gaming and nouveau works seamlessly OOB and get updated via apt. IMO that’s the best you can get.

What more do I need?

Re: Debian and firmware

#163

Post by guilhas »

p0d wrote: post #125
guilhas wrote: post #57

The installation asks you yes/no if you want to install non-free firmware

Tbh I don't care about free, non-free firmware. This was not my install issue.

There is a similar model notes in the wiki

InstallingDebianOn HP Envy 14 Beats Edition 2020ep https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/HP/Envy%2014%20Be...

> The installer isn't able to detect the Wifi or LAN network cards. To do a net install from the LAN card you need to drop to a shell and do

modprobe atl1c echo "1969 1083" > /sys/bus/pci/drivers/atl1c/new_id

Re: Debian and firmware

#164

Post by guilhas »

Why should Debian/Linux and users reward hardware that goes out of their way to make everyone's life worse for profit?

Maybe hardware companies should make an effort to contribute and make their hardware work better on Linux

When I buy a laptop I make sure it is Linux/Debian/Arch... compatible

Extra I go on eBay and get a cheap compatible open source driver WiFi card, like QCNFA335 to replace the original

Re: Debian and firmware

#165

Post by regularfry »

seba_dos1 wrote: post #132
regularfry wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think part of the problem is identifying which of those alternatives is closest to "exactly Debian, but without the hardware support problems". You really want something which tracks closely enough that bug reports against packages in that distro could be directly and intentionally accepted by Debian's tracker. The problem with accepting "Debian is not a friendly distro and that's fine" is that unlesss the snags ar…

> I think part of the problem is identifying which of those alternatives is closest to "exactly Debian, but without the hardware support problems". That sounds like Debian's non-free ISO.

Yes, but it needs a different name to create a clear space between Debian's comparative purity and the ideologically messy practicalities of actually getting the hardware working. Technically there's little challenge, the hard work on that part has been done.

Re: Debian and firmware

#166

Post by happymellon »

josteink wrote: post #162
cesarb wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Does that mean the drivers are open source? Yes, they are. Of the big three (Intel, AMD, Nvidia), only the Nvidia drivers aren't open source (there's an open source driver for Nvidia, called "nouveau", but it doesn't come from the manufacturer and isn't that good).

> there's an open source driver for Nvidia, called "nouveau", but it doesn't come from the manufacturer and isn't that good Define good? I’m not gaming and nouveau works seamlessly OOB and get updated via apt. IMO that’s the best you can get. What more do I need?

It doesn't do reclocking on any modern card, so the power consumption is vastly higher than it needs to be.

There are other points that aren't directly applicable to gaming which just aren't as great. Nouveau are pretty open and honest about how their driver will never be that great on the modern cards because Nvidia doesnt want it to be.

Re: Debian and firmware

#167

Post by ggm »

squarefoot wrote: post #123
ggm wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Skim reading earns dismerit points! Thanks for pointing this out, I'll try harder to use them next install I do.

You probably want to keep this link at hand as the Debian main page hides everything but the standard stock image. https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/unofficial/non-free/image...

Thanks!

Re: Debian and firmware

#168

Post by jmclnx »

binkHN wrote: post #22

OpenBSD is in a similar boat and continues to fight the good fight. The developers continue to reach out to the hardware manufacturers to get permission to include firmware in OpenBSD without an NDA. Sometimes they're successful, but, more often than not, they're not. I think if more of the open source community stood steadfast in this regard, more progress could be made here. The saddest part of all this, perhaps, i…

Yes, but one you need these blobs for wireless, you will may to use a wired connection or download them to a flash drive and copy them over.

What OpenBSD seems better, but in many cases, you may need a wired connection for on First Install. Upgrading, no issues but I like to be plugged in anyway just in case wireless drops.

Re: Debian and firmware

#169

Post by slavik81 »

blihp wrote: post #160
slavik81 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All the ROCm components beneath HIP are in Debian Unstable (aside from the firmware as per topic), and I think at least a few components made it into Ubuntu 22.04. Facilitating Debian packaging for ROCm has been my hobby for the past year or so. While ROCm doesn't officially support consumer GPUs, the supported W6800 is Navi 21. The consumer Navi 21 cards thus also work. Those are the 6800 / 6800 XT and 6900 XT. If a…

A big 'thank you' to you and the others working on this as it is badly needed! I've been following the progress of this work and I'm looking forward to the day when it makes it into testing. Unstable lives up to its name too often for my needs[1]. Unfortunately, my hobby project dance card is full right now or I'd probably try to pitch in. Now a bit of cold water for real world use cases currently... The bulk of the…

I am just one lowly engineer, but I do what I can.

The other 5000 and 6000 series cards work to varying degrees. Unfortunately, since AMD doesn't officially support them, I can't easily get hardware to test them myself.

My understanding is that the RX 6700 XT (gfx1031) mostly works, with some caveats. Gentoo did some performance tuning for the BLAS libraries with that GPU. The AMD GPU libraries aren't built for that architecture by default, but I'd be happy to help anyone compile them from source. There's an extensive open source test suite that can be used to validate GPU functionality outside of the official hardware support list.

Re: Debian and firmware

#170

Post by blihp »

slavik81 wrote: post #169
blihp wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A big 'thank you' to you and the others working on this as it is badly needed! I've been following the progress of this work and I'm looking forward to the day when it makes it into testing. Unstable lives up to its name too often for my needs[1]. Unfortunately, my hobby project dance card is full right now or I'd probably try to pitch in. Now a bit of cold water for real world use cases currently... The bulk of the…

I am just one lowly engineer, but I do what I can. The other 5000 and 6000 series cards work to varying degrees. Unfortunately, since AMD doesn't officially support them, I can't easily get hardware to test them myself. My understanding is that the RX 6700 XT (gfx1031) mostly works, with some caveats. Gentoo did some performance tuning for the BLAS libraries with that GPU. The AMD GPU libraries aren't built for that…

Don't get me wrong, your efforts are definitely appreciated. It would just be nice if AMD officially put more of a priority on consumer Linux users. That's the reason I push back on the assertion that AMD Linux GPU (compute) support is there: it really isn't as what we've got are retrofitted enterprise drivers that, if you can get them to install, may or may not work for a given GPU and have some caveats if they do work. And if they don't work, well tough luck as they aren't officially supported anyways. Short of official support happening, it would be nice to see at least some skunkworks project(s) to get open source compute drivers going as the open source graphics drivers work quite well.[1]

I've gotten both the 6700 XT and 6600 to work (that's how I discovered the PCIe atomics issue: trying to run both cards at the same time with OpenCL) which is why I initially said 'can be made to work'. It took quite a bit of fiddling and I'm sure having the drivers packaged in the Debian repos will be better still as I don't know what I don't know and knowledge on the ground re: AMD compute drivers still appears a bit thin.

[1] The part of this story I find so depressing is that AMD should be eating nVidia's lunch re: Linux support. But since at a management level AMD doesn't seem to care about consumer Linux they actually manage to make nVidia's drivers look good in comparison. It would be nice if they would take a page out of Intel's playbook and give engineers like yourself their support to actually do consumer (open source) Linux support work as your day job. I can dream...

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