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Zacchiroli: working with FSF on Debian Free-ness assessmentZacchiroli: working with FSF on Debian Free-ness assessmentPosted Jul 5, 2012 17:06 UTC (Thu) by smcv (subscriber, #53363)In reply to: Zacchiroli: working with FSF on Debian Free-ness assessment by gmaxwell Parent article: Zacchiroli: working with FSF on Debian Free-ness assessment
As far as I understand it, the tg3 driver requires binary-only firmware for some (half?) of the hardware it supports. All the Debian installer can see is "you have hardware for which the tg3 module is appropriate, perhaps you'll need the firmware for that".
Ideally it would be able to tell that your particular hardware was one of the models that works without additional firmware and keep quiet about it, while still giving the same prompt to people whose hardware wasn't going to work otherwise.
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Zacchiroli: working with FSF on Debian Free-ness assessment Posted Jul 13, 2012 0:46 UTC (Fri) by BenHutchings (subscriber, #37955) [Link] As far as I understand it, the tg3 driver requires binary-only firmware for some (half?) of the hardware it supports. The firmware file dependencies are declared statically per-module, so we can't determine whether a specific device might or might not need a firmware file. Only a few very early Broadcom GbE chips need those firmware patches. The others presumably still run non-free firmware but it's installed in some form of NVRAM. The main reason for warning on upgrades is that new driver versions may require new firmware blobs. Perhaps we should try to avoid repeatedly warning about the same files.
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