Create linux-modules-extra-generic metapackage

[Dimitri John Ledkov]

Hi,

On Tue, Feb 15, 2022 at 3:41 PM Stefan Bader <stefan.bader at canonical.com> wrote:
>
> On 14.02.22 15:07, Clement Cherlin wrote:
> > Greetings, all.
>
> Hi Clement,
>
> >
> > I run an Ubuntu desktop as a VMWare virtual machine client.
> >
> > The linux-modules-extra-${VERSION}-generic package contains several
> > critical VMWare drivers (vmwgfx, vmw_vmci, vmw_vsock), so I need to
> > keep it installed and updated.
>
> I think the real issue is that the VMware drivers are not part of the
> linux-modules package which is always installed when installing any linux-image.
> The linux-modules-extra contains those drivers (at least that was the intend)
> which are not relevant for any VM. Amongst those are the wireless drivers and
> those likely rely on linux-firmware a lot.
> At least for 20.04/Focal the vmw_vmci and vmw_vsock drivers are part of modules.
> But not vmwgfx which we should fix. Maybe you can double check which VMware
> drivers you need and where those come from (dpkg -S <module path>). Then the bug
> report should be changed to request moving any VMware drivers in modules-extra
> into modules. Which would allow you to switch to linux-virtual get rid of
> linux-firmware.
>

I agree with Stefan, historically we would include
$virtualization-guest drivers in the linux-modules, i.e. things that
are needed to have hardware support working inside Hyper-V,
Virtualbox, Qemu/KVM, and similar. VMWare drivers fit that definition.

> Regards,
> -Stefan
>
> >
> > Since it is a virtual machine, there is no need to install packages
> > such as linux-firmware (761MB uncompressed). I would prefer to remove
> > linux-firmware to reduce disk space and bandwidth usage, but
> > linux-image-generic depends on it.
> >
> > I would remove linux-image-generic and rely on linux-image-virtual,
> > but linux-image-virtual does not depend on
> > linux-modules-extra-${VERSION}-generic, and there is no
> > linux-modules-extra-generic metapackage. I would have to manually
> > install linux-modules-extra-${VERSION}-generic every time I update the
> > kernel.
> >
> > There are already linux-modules-extra-aws, linux-modules-extra-gcp and
> > linux-modules-extra-gke metapackages which fulfill the same purpose
> > for their respective linux-modules-extra-${VERSION}-xxx packages. It
> > would be very helpful to me (and, I'm sure, many others) to complete
> > the set with a linux-modules-extra-generic metapackage that would
> > depend on the latest linux-modules-extra-${VERSION}-generic.
> >
> > I created https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1960633/
> > and was told that this is a better place than Launchpad to discuss new
> > packages.
> >
> > Thank you for your consideration.
> >
> > Cheers,
> > Clement Cherlin
> >
>
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