To: alpine-devel@lists.alpinelinux.org
From: Oliver Smith <ollieparanoid@bitmessage.ch>
Subject: [alpine-devel] Splitting up linux-firmware?
Message-ID: <4d19a51c-3eba-9775-0208-4d87da66effc@bitmessage.ch>
Date: Sat, 06 Jan 2018 22:13:00 +0000
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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?

Thanks,
Oliver Smith



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