Splitting up linux-firmware

[Neal Gompa]

On Mon, Jun 2, 2025 at 12:06 PM Juerg Haefliger
<juerg.haefliger at canonical.com> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> linux-firmware is ever growing and I'd like to entertain the thought of
> splitting it up. Not as fine grained as Debian but only split out the bigger
> GPU blobs (for now):
>
> - linux-firmware (provides the bulk of the blobs)
> - linux-<vendor>-graphics (similar to Debian, provides vendor specific
>   graphics related firmwares)
>
> This obviously can't break users so I'm trying to understand which pieces
> need to be updated for seamless release upgrades and new installations. I
> think this means that we need to detect what's in the system and install the
> relevant linux-<vendor>-graphics package(s). Is this ubuntu-release-upgrader?
> subiquity? ubuntu-drivers? All of them? Anything else?
>
> Image generation and seeds would probably be affected by this as well.
>
> Does anyone see any (other) issues with this?
>

I think it's a good idea, but from my experience, you'll probably want
a metapackage that pulls everything in so install media and live media
can include them.

That *might* negate some of the benefits, depending on how you look at it.



-- 
Neal Gompa (FAS: ngompa)