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Debian and firmware

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Re: Debian and firmware

#61

Post by jabl »

usrn wrote: post #12
qbasic_forever wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What incentive do manufacturers have to release open firmware? Let's get serious, it's been 20+ years and desktop Linux usage isn't moving the needle or getting any of their attention. IMHO it would be far better to put effort into change at a different level, like perhaps a broader push with right to repair legislation that expands it to include releasing firmware in addition to schematics, spare parts, etc. Change…

Everyone in the embedded space goes to kernel.org for WiFi stuff (firmware, regulatory info etc) regardless of which OS they're using. Being put at the top of the Wiki because you're "easy to work with" would be a massive advertisement.

By all means, the "free software community" should promote HW with free firmware, and giving the top spot on the kernel.org pages sounds like a good approach. And yeah, I spent a lot of time looking at wifi drivers when getting a wifi router. ath9k was the gold standard here with no blobs, and as a result was the favored platform for the wifi bufferbloat work. Unfortunately the follow-up ath10k needs a blob.

But I don't think punishing potential users who just want to get their laptop to work is particularly effective free software advocacy. Most likely the user has no clue what wifi chip their laptop has.

Re: Debian and firmware

#62

Post by shmerl »

It is annoying for sure, that for something like AMD GPU you have to go out of the way to get a "non official" Debian installer that includes amdgpu firmware, otherwise installer won't be able to work.

For the most part this annoyance affects the installation step. After your system is in some semi-working state where you at least can install packages or have access to network, you can add any firmware you want already.

Re: Debian and firmware

#63

Post by blihp »

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…

Setting aside the ideological arguments, the primary reason you should not be installing video drivers, or any other device drivers, outside of what your distro has packaged (if you can help it) is that they have an annoying tendency to break when you do a version upgrade leaving you with, if you're lucky, only the ability to log in via the command line or ssh. Worst case, you can end up with an entirely hosed install. Even if they work (for now), keeping them in sync with the rest of your system can be an exercise in frustration.

As someone who is currently dealing with proprietary AMD drivers (and previously proprietary nVidia drivers) on Debian testing, it's pretty much only a matter of time before things will break... you've been warned but I understand if you need to do it anyways (as I do for compute support with AMD currently.) I'm very much looking forward to the day when we have Debian packages (at least in the non-free repo) for current AMD GPU compute stuff.

Re: Debian and firmware

#64

Post by blihp »

Cu3PO42 wrote: post #50
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 `fi…

Unless you're running one of the handful of 'officially' supported distros/versions, it really isn't that good yet for at least 6000-series cards. Sure, the upstream video drivers work fine if you just need basic functionality. But if you need more advanced capabilities (i.e. monitoring/managing frequencies/power consumption/etc) or do GPU compute, you're pretty much stuck using the AMD repos which are built for LTS releases of enterprise distros. They can be made to work (with varying degrees of pain) for some releases of desktop distros but it is currently very far from painless.

Re: Debian and firmware

#65

Post by outsomnia »

pabs3 wrote: post #46
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…

> 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.

Same as Fedora, Debian seems to package linux-firmware?

https://packages.debian.org/sid/firmware-misc-nonfree

Re: Debian and firmware

#66

Post by jcelerier »

Gigachad wrote: post #43
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.

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 d…

The engineering school I went to used Debian on every desktop

Re: Debian and firmware

#68

Post by rincebrain »

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.

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 regularly use the "firmware-misc-nonfree" package, along with 9.57% for the realtek package, 8.76% for the modern Intel wifi firmware package (iwlwifi), and 7.07% for firmware-amd-graphics.

I can't claim that's a statistically significant percentage of Debian users, I don't have that data, but of the ones who volunteered their information, even assuming perfect overlap, a not insignificant number of users are happily opting into the "not officially Debian, we swear" portion of the world.

[1] - https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=firmware-nonfree

Re: Debian and firmware

#69

Post by hypothesis »

mjg59 wrote: post #59
hypothesis wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My experience is the same as the author's: there's more today that needs non-free support to use Linux on the desktop than there was in the past. Is that a function of Linux Desktop simply being more capable nowadays? Also, there is a world of difference between not publishing signed closed-source firmware for a driver that does not exist vs having an open source driver with published firmware.

> Is that a function of Linux Desktop simply being more capable nowadays? I don't think so - it's more a function of hardware becoming more complicated, and vendors choosing to put a lot of the logic in firmware rather than putting it in ROM because there's a much lower chance of them getting it right first time now than there was in the past.

Is hardware becoming more complicated without being more capable? I just think that we’re taking lots of things for granted nowadays, which require complexity to be managed successfully.

ROM to firmware creep is understandable, given flexibility that you mentioned. But to an end-user, is there a difference between having a blob in ROM vs firmware, if both are closed source?

Re: Debian and firmware

#70

Post by trashburger »

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…

If you consider the fact that veganism/vegetarianism is very unhealthy without taking the nutrients you're missing as supplements (which could be argued as being "reverse engineered meat"), then I would suggest that yes, until we reverse engineer the "meat" we should include it in the "diet" (along Free software).
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