Date: Tue, 9 Jan 2018 10:24:54 +0200
From: Timo Teras <timo.teras@iki.fi>
To: Oliver Smith <ollieparanoid@bitmessage.ch>
Cc: alpine-devel@lists.alpinelinux.org
Subject: Re: [alpine-devel] Splitting up linux-firmware?
Message-ID: <20180109102454.4fb32aee@vostro>
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On Mon, 08 Jan 2018 16:51:00 +0000
Oliver Smith <ollieparanoid@bitmessage.ch> wrote:

> William Pitcock:
> > On Sat, Jan 6, 2018 at 4:13 PM, Oliver Smith
> > <ollieparanoid@bitmessage.ch> wrote:  
> >> Hey alpine-devel,
> >>
> >> there's the >250 MB (install size) linux-firmware package, of
> >> which usually only few files are needed for one machine. For other
> >> packages, Alpine already splits off -dev and even -doc to save as
> >> much space as possible, so it would make sense to me if we started
> >> splitting up linux-firmware as well. Our use case in Alpine Linux
> >> based postmarketOS is, that we could only flash the firmware
> >> subpackges to the mobile device, which we actually need (thus
> >> making the total image size a lot smaller).
> >>
> >> The package provides files in /lib/firmware and is already
> >> categorized in subfolders. So we could make one subpackage for
> >> each subfolder. Examples:
> >>
> >> - linux-firmware-liquido (23.7 MB)
> >> - linux-firmware-netrome (22.0 MB)
> >> - linux-firmware-brcm (15.1 MB)
> >> - linux-firmware-amdgpu (13.9 MB)
> >> - linux-firmware-intel (12.8 MB)
> >> - linux-firmware-ti-connectivity (8.6 MB)
> >> - linux-firmware-bnx2x (8.6 MB)
> >> - linux-firmware-mrvl (7.7 MB)
> >> - linux-firmware-radeon (7.4 MB)
> >>
> >> Files directly in /lib/firmware could go into
> >> "linux-firmware-other", and the "linux-firmware" package could
> >> depend on all its subpackages for compatibility.
> >>
> >> What do you think, would it make sense to submit a PR for that?  
> > 
> > Yes, please do it.
> 
> Done: https://github.com/alpinelinux/aports/pull/3037

Thanks for working on this!

Few additional comments:

Should we now also change linux-grsec and linux-vanilla to not depend
on linux-firmware? Because they still pull in the meta-package pulling
in everything. Should the modules be split accordingly? Or should we
pull in some core firmwares only automatically?

Btw. mkinitfs properly picks up the firmwares for initramfs disks based
on kernel modules on initramfs. See:
https://git.alpinelinux.org/cgit/mkinitfs/tree/mkinitfs.in#n127

I earlier had the idea to do similar pruning for linux-firmware package
as it contains overlapping versions of firmwares, and firmwares for
modules we don't even build. However, this would require us to track the
firmwares requires for all of the kernel builds we do (all arches; all
configs). So it was not so trivial to implement.

And finally a minor nitpick: now have linux-firmware-RTL8192E;
generally we don't use uppercase in package names.

But thanks again for working on this. I have had on my todo list for a
while and good to see you're getting it done :)

Timo


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