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

[Timo Aaltonen]

On 27.04.2011 18:30, Tim Gardner wrote:
> 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/

I've no idea, but the server folks should know, so I've added
ubuntu-server to the recipients.

I'd trade some server software to drivers any day, but the list might
disagree..

-- 
timo.aaltonen at canonical.com