separate nic-*modules-udeb, remnants of the past?

[Tim Gardner]

On 04/27/2011 08:56 AM, Timo Aaltonen wrote:
>
> 	Hi!
>
>    A friend of mine was pretty upset when he (and some friends of his)
> were unable to install Ubuntu with networking when using the netboot-
> and server-images. The reason for that was that jme.ko is not included
> in nic-modules-udeb (*). The module lists are maintained by hand,
> because they are split in nic-{,pcmcia,usb,shared}-modules-udeb.
>
> Colin mentioned that this was due to some images not needing all the
> modules, so to save space they are split this way. I checked the
> extracted sizes of those (i386, generic):
>
> nic-modules:		6096 kB
> nic-shared-modules:	719 kB
> nic-pcmcia-modules:	424 kB
> nic-usb-modules:	776 kB
>
> So, is it really worth all the trouble to save ~1.2MB (+the missing
> modules) on the installation media? Wouldn't it make more sense to
> automatically include all the drivers (and blacklist some, if necessary)
> so networking works regardless of the installation medium used. Working
> NICs are a rather critical piece of the puzzle these days :)
>
>
> * https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/560249
>

Well, how much space _do_ we have on the server and alternate CDs ? 
Without wireless the drivers/net directory sums to about 11Mb. The 
minimum available space on the server and alternate CDs dictate what I 
can do with udebs since the same kernel image is packaged on both.

rtg at zinc:2.6.38-9-generic$ du -sh kernel/drivers/net/
16M	kernel/drivers/net/
rtg at zinc:2.6.38-9-generic$ du -sh kernel/drivers/net/wireless/
5.2M	kernel/drivers/net/wireless/

rtg
-- 
Tim Gardner tim.gardner at canonical.com