Splitting up linux-firmware

[Michael Hudson-Doyle]

On Tue, 3 Jun 2025 at 04:05, 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 sounds like a good plan for me. I've long been a bit agitated about
how much of the server installer ISO is taken up by firmware -- it's
something on the order of 25% of the total size! (~500MiB out of a total of
~2GiB). Would the server installer be able to get away without the
-graphics blobs? (i.e. are systems in practice to operate a vt without any
firmware at all?)

Cheers,
mwh


> 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?
>
> Thanks
> ...Juerg
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