blog/data/2010-05-22-di-firmware.txt

   1 Title: More flexible firmware handling in debian-installer
   2 Tags: english, debian, debian edu
   3 Date: 2010-05-22 21:30
   4
   5 <p>After a long break from debian-installer development, I finally
   6 found time today to return to the project.  Having to spend less time
   7 working dependency based boot in debian, as it is almost complete now,
   8 definitely helped freeing some time.</p>
   9
  10 <p>A while back, I ran into a problem while working on Debian Edu.  We
  11 include some firmware packages on the Debian Edu CDs, those needed to
  12 get disk and network controllers working.  Without having these
  13 firmware packages available during installation, it is impossible to
  14 install Debian Edu on the given machine, and because our target group
  15 are non-technical people, asking them to provide firmware packages on
  16 an external medium is a support pain.  Initially, I expected it to be
  17 enough to include the firmware packages on the CD to get
  18 debian-installer to find and use them.  This proved to be wrong.
  19 Next, I hoped it was enough to symlink the relevant firmware packages
  20 to some useful location on the CD (tried /cdrom/ and
  21 /cdrom/firmware/).  This also proved to not work, and at this point I
  22 found time to look at the debian-installer code to figure out what was
  23 going to work.</p>
  24
  25 <p>The firmware loading code is in the hw-detect package, and a closer
  26 look revealed that it would only look for firmware packages outside
  27 the installation media, so the CD was never checked for firmware
  28 packages.  It would only check USB sticks, floppies and other
  29 "external" media devices.  Today I changed it to also look in the
  30 /cdrom/firmware/ directory on the mounted CD or DVD, which should
  31 solve the problem I ran into with Debian edu.  I also changed it to
  32 look in /firmware/, to make sure the installer also find firmware
  33 provided in the initrd when booting the installer via PXE, to allow us
  34 to provide the same feature in the PXE setup included in Debian
  35 Edu.</p>
  36
  37 <p>To make sure firmware deb packages with a license questions are not
  38 activated without asking if the license is accepted, I extended
  39 hw-detect to look for preinst scripts in the firmware packages, and
  40 run these before activating the firmware during installation.  The
  41 license question is asked using debconf in the preinst, so this should
  42 solve the issue for the firmware packages I have looked at so far.</p>
  43
  44 <p>If you want to discuss the details of these features, please
  45 contact us on debian-boot@lists.debian.org.</p>