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Debian and firmware

blog.einval.com

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Re: Debian and firmware

#41

Post by diffeomorphism »

apatheticonion wrote: post #29

As a Windows/MacOS user who has moved full time to linux, I ended up on Debian Testing as my daily (going to try Fedora soon). I still live back in the days when Fedora would give you a pop up to install non-free drivers ("additional software" or something like that). I have been using Debian as my daily driver for almost 6 months now and Linux in general for years - I still have no idea how the video drivers work. I…

> still have no idea how the video drivers work.

Why would you want to? This is not something I want to actually have to care about. And also I absolutely don't have to.

> What is going on and why isn't it as simple as Window's where I run an executable and a setup wizard does the rest?

Do you mean the included drivers? Or the OEM ones? Or the Nvidia ones? Current or beta? Also, it is even simpler than that on distros that support nonfree stuff, e.g. on ubuntu it is just click here for which nvidia stuff you want and done. As opposed to navigate websites, versions and wizards in windows.

Re: Debian and firmware

#42

Post by NovemberWhiskey »

b5n wrote: post #20
NovemberWhiskey wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the only way we'll see long term change is to keep the friction on ... but there are two possible long term changes, right? In one of them, the friction incrementally pushes manufacturers not to have proprietary firmware and the number of machines supported by the Debian official install improves. In the other one, the friction incrementally discourages users from installing Debian, and they either give up on Linux…

Depends on how you define 'user-hostile'. There's already a link to the non-free image on the current installation page, and I wouldn't consider respecting your freedoms as hostile.

So if Debian were some megacorp, someone would already be complaining about the "dark pattern" that puts the link to the directory (n.b. not the actual images) for non-free images down the bottom of that page in small print inside a box labeled like a warning, and calls them "unofficial".

As opposed to making it clear that this is the one you need if you're doing something outrageous like ... using a laptop or something.

Re: Debian and firmware

#43

Post by Gigachad »

zrm wrote: post #30
Gigachad wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This could be seen as a benefit and a downside. It’s basically suggesting that you find other distros nicer to use but chose to use the less nice one due to principals. Most users will pick the nicer to use one.

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.

Debian is a great project I know. But the comment that they only use debian for its principals directly suggests they would use something else if principals were not considered. Suggesting the other distros are better for their uses. Anecdotally I don't think I have ever seen a debian desktop user, and I wouldn't pick it for desktop either because they don't make it easy to get everything working like other distros do where you check a box on install to include the proprietary bits.

Re: Debian and firmware

#44

Post by johnny22 »

apatheticonion wrote: post #29

As a Windows/MacOS user who has moved full time to linux, I ended up on Debian Testing as my daily (going to try Fedora soon). I still live back in the days when Fedora would give you a pop up to install non-free drivers ("additional software" or something like that). I have been using Debian as my daily driver for almost 6 months now and Linux in general for years - I still have no idea how the video drivers work. I…

mesa is the thing that handles opengl and vulkan for most cards that aren't nvidia.

Generally you don't have to touch video drivers at all in linux except for arm stuff and nvidia. (that's not always the case,but mostly) Just keep your kernel up to date. That's the main problem with debian and wanting to say play games or have newer hardware.

Re: Debian and firmware

#45

Post by outsomnia »

The canonical firmware is the BIOS, I was pleasantly surprised when Fedora updated the BIOS on my Dell XPS device by itself recently... historically that has been somewhere between a nuisance (Reboot and then UEFI network update), a struggle (dig out the image from an EXE on a flash drive), or impossible (some windows-only app that doesn't work via a VM). And whatever the annoyance level, when done manually it was usually done months or years after the BIOS release.

Other firmware the cpu microcode is handled via packaging.

There has been a lot of work packaging peripheral firmware for things like mice... it's not like it is going to go away. This is also distributed in packaging in Fedora now.

It's not ideal that these are proprietary blobs but some accommodation is needed I think.

Re: Debian and firmware

#46

Post by pabs3 »

outsomnia wrote: post #45

The canonical firmware is the BIOS, I was pleasantly surprised when Fedora updated the BIOS on my Dell XPS device by itself recently... historically that has been somewhere between a nuisance (Reboot and then UEFI network update), a struggle (dig out the image from an EXE on a flash drive), or impossible (some windows-only app that doesn't work via a VM). And whatever the annoyance level, when done manually it was us…

That firmware update was made possible by the fwupd software project (containing various firmware updaters) and the LVFS project, a service for hardware vendors to upload their proprietary firmware updates for mice, the BIOS/UEFI and other devices to.

https://fwupd.org/

While it is great, it doesn't solve the problem that this post is talking about; when devices have no pre-installed firmware and expect you to upload (proprietary) firmware on every boot. This is usually things like WiFi chips, GPUs, Ethernet etc.

Re: Debian and firmware

#47

Post by molticrystal »

>Due to these reasons, more and more devices in a typical computer now need firmware to be uploaded at runtime for them to function correctly. This has grown:

> Going back 10 years or so, most computers only needed firmware uploads to make WiFi hardware work.

You can actually go back to almost 30 years with dialup modems, most notably the winmodem/softmodem popularizing this concept in the pc market. If there is anything to blame on this path of binary blobs, I'd fault them.

Re: Debian and firmware

#48

Post by ethbr0 »

josephcsible wrote: post #23

I'm usually on the FSF's side about everything, but this is one place where I disagree with them and agree with this article. A free OS with free firmware is definitely better than a free OS with proprietary firmware, but both of those are way better than a proprietary OS with proprietary firmware. By making the middle ground difficult, a lot of users have to choose between ideological purity and working hardware, an…

In the end, it should distill down to:

"What is the likelihood of closed-firmware-blob hardware manufacturers changing their behavior because of Debian?"

vs

"What is the likelihood of fewer people using Debian because their installer is more difficult?"

IMHO, the odds aren't good that ideological purity is going to have any net result on hardware manufacturers. So you're really just shooting yourself in the foot so you can feel painfully just.

That said, there are absolutely fights Debian can and should focus on, even if they're painful: ones where there's a chance of victory, and the rewards of victory balance with the risks of the attempt.

Re: Debian and firmware

#49

Post by MrJohz »

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…

In all fairness, flexitarianism is a thing, and I know a lot of people who would never want to go fully vegetarian or vegan, but who want to reduce their meat intake significantly, generally for environmental reasons. The change in messaging from "a single animal death is murder and unacceptable" to "any reduction is good, the more the better" is probably significantly not effective in this context at actually reducing overall meat consumption (although I unfortunately don't have any evidence for that hunch).

Re: Debian and firmware

#50

Post by Cu3PO42 »

apatheticonion wrote: post #29

As a Windows/MacOS user who has moved full time to linux, I ended up on Debian Testing as my daily (going to try Fedora soon). I still live back in the days when Fedora would give you a pop up to install non-free drivers ("additional software" or something like that). I have been using Debian as my daily driver for almost 6 months now and Linux in general for years - I still have no idea how the video drivers work. I…

The driver situation for modern AMD GPUs is pretty good. There is an open-source `amdgpu` driver in the mainline Linux kernel maintained by AMD themselves. If you use a somewhat recent kernel, that'll be there. You need `mesa` in userspace which provides the OpenGL interface, etc. to your applications.

This is why there's no need to install anything from the Radeon website -- you already have a driver.

As for the `firmware-amd-graphics` package, it provides proprietary firmware for your GPU. That could be as insignificant as microcode updates or an important part of the interface that the driver expects. It's probably a good idea to install (and maybe try and fix the warnings.)

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