Debian Begins A General Resolution To Decide What To Do With Non-Free Firmware

[tunnelblick]

Broadcom bnx2 ethernet driver need non-free firmware too for example.

Anyway, cd image with non-free firmware already exist.

https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/unofficial/non-free/cd-including-firmware/

so option B already exist, just need to replace unoffical by offical in the url ...

Exactly my thoughts. Due to Dell a large portion of Debian users know about that dedicated firmware iso...

[V1tol]

a better option would be to actually work on developing free firmware instead of wasting so much effort on handwringing over non-free firmware

And how would you do that without hardware documentation? Even if you have billions of money and hundreds of developers, doing reverse-engineering is simply illegal in some countries.

[ping-wu]

https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/u...ding-firmware/

so option B already exist, just need to replace unoffical by offical in the url ...

We have been using the non-official iso which includes non-free packages for a while. Works great, no looking back.

(the following was added on 2022.08.28)

This is where we download the non-official non-free-included iso:

https://cdimage.debian.org/images/un...64/iso-hybrid/

Direct download (gnome version):

https://cdimage.debian.org/images/un...me+nonfree.iso

Edit the /etc/apt/source.list file by changing "bullseye" to "sid" then do an "sudo apt update; sudo apt full-upgrade", we got ourselves a fully-working Sid/Bookworm system*.

* After an initial rocky journey, Sid/Bookworm is finally pretty stable (and beautiful). Actually, for desktop uses, the so-called "unstable" Debian version is more stable than the "stable" version (Bullseye). Please see:

https://forums.debian.net/viewtopic....758065#p758065

[stormcrow]

And how would you do that without hardware documentation? Even if you have billions of money and hundreds of developers, doing reverse-engineering is simply illegal in some countries.

The reverse engineering efforts are carried out in those countries where it's mostly legal, such as the US (with a few gotchas that don't affect most such efforts). Same as with any other project. The work goes on where it's legal to do so, then released to the general public. Individual users are able to choose whether they want to use the resulting work (like libdvdcss or all the hardware drivers in Linux that were developed through reversing - which is probably most of them.).

[Vorpal]

Just have a button or grub menu boot option on the install media to select if you want to load non-free firmware. With an explanation next to it of course.

That way the user can choose.

[elbar]

There should be user warning that some firmware(or some driver) is (vendor) unsupported or has serious flaws. There are already some kernel warnings(like for some old ATI cards or some modern CPUs :-), but users don't know or care about.

[DRanged]

Broadcom bnx2 ethernet driver need non-free firmware too for example.

Anyway, cd image with non-free firmware already exist.

https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/unofficial/non-free/cd-including-firmware/

so option B already exist, just need to replace unoffical by offical in the url ...

I second that and maybe a slight tweak that when the hardware needs a firmware blob it only installs that and not the whole caboodle and I would think it should't be to difficult to implement as they already do a firmware check.
So in practice that would be wifi and nics mainly and maybe some odd bit of hardware. For videocards they still can install the free drivers so it at least it gives you the chance to install the proprietary graphics drivers or whatever when you have logged into a running system.

[andyprough]

Someone might want to mention to the Debian geniuses that there's already like 5,000 Debian respins and Debian-based distros that do exactly this.

Including Ubuntu, whose own devs dominate the Debian governance and drive these moronic votes.

[jabl]

I second that and maybe a slight tweak that when the hardware needs a firmware blob it only installs that and not the whole caboodle and I would think it should't be to difficult to implement as they already do a firmware check.

Why bother? FW that just sits there inertly on disk an is never loaded by any device isn't going to give your CPU cooties. At worst it's a slight waste of download bandwidth and disk space, though OTOH splitting up the FW's into a zillion packages comes with costs too.

So in practice that would be wifi and nics mainly and maybe some odd bit of hardware. For videocards they still can install the free drivers so it at least it gives you the chance to install the proprietary graphics drivers or whatever when you have logged into a running system.

Don't most free video drivers these days rely on proprietary firmware? IIRC Intel and AMD both do, and NVIDIA as well (open if you use the new openRM driver).

[yoshi314]

i think the sane option would be to simply offer the non-free image as default download.

if someone wants image with no firmware - they know what they are doing, and should have a choice. but the default option should favour the user - because majority of the people absolutely need that firmware to get the basics going.

i recently stumbled into a problem on my old amd A10 based machine which mostly serves as a tape backup server - it would just not work with a monitor. but ran just fine over ssh. turns out i lacked the radeon firmware and that somehow locked up the local text mode terminal, making it impossible to login locally.

i know about nomodeset and such, but it still took me a while to figure out what was going wrong. and i suppose a lot of people might have mysterious issues with their hardware when the firmware is missing - and not just not being able to detect specific devices, but various malfunctions like mine.