split some large, lesser-used firmware files into -extra package

[Rolf Leggewie]

The linux-image-generic package depends on linux-firmware which is over half a gigabyte in size installed. I will assume that quite many people do not have netronome hardware which weighs in at almost 150MB of that. I kindly suggest to put such large firmware for less common hardware into its own linux-firmware-extra package which would be recommended by linux-firmare.

Comments?

I'm willing to help with the packaging provided that the changes have a chance to land.

[Juerg Haefliger (juergh)]

Why is the size problematic? And how do you define less common HW? Where do you draw the line? Some HW might not be common for you but is for others. I'm sympathetic to the request but it's not trivial to find the right balance without upsetting/breaking existing users.

[Rolf Leggewie (r0lf)]

Juerg, thank you for picking this up and my apologies for the late response.

You are of course right that there is no scientific answer or approach to this question. I'd simply look at the biggest directories with ncdu and make a decision if I thought that hardware was common when going down the list from top towards the bottom (first few entries only, of course).

Let's be clear that this is not about stopping to support anything, upsetting anybody or break things or make things harder for people. Anybody who has the default of installing recommends by default will not be affected by this at all. It is about choice, for people in a scenario with limited ressources who'd like to trim some fat. Those people would need to make a conscious choice to remove the unnecessary (for them) packages. I certainly won't need support for netronome on any of my machines and would not install the package that contains it if it were optional.

[Rolf Leggewie (r0lf)]

The linux-firmware package in jammy grew considerably and is now almost 1GB in size.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Mantas Kriaučiūnas (mantas)]

This issue is solved in Debian a long time ago:

metapackage https://packages.debian.org/sid/firmware-linux depends on small firmware-linux-free package and firmware-linux-nonfree metapackage

metapackage https://packages.debian.org/sid/firmware-linux-nonfree
depends on most useful "nonfree" firmware, including this pretty firmware-misc-nonfree package (takes only ~40 MB after installation, instead of ~900MB sized of Ubuntu's linux-firmware):

https://packages.debian.org/sid/firmware-misc-nonfree

Btw, netronome firmware is packaged separately in Debian, as you wish, see https://packages.debian.org/sid/firmware-netronome

Someone from Ubuntu developers decided simply put all useful and almost not used firmware into huge package, which is updated very often and this causes a lot of problems for users, especially who uses SSD storage or slow internet connection :(

For example see bug #1972806 - simple change of some device firmware (few kilobytes size) requires to download ~230MB linux-firmware package for *every* Ubuntu user. This is a nonsense and waste of bandwidth and other resources.

[Rolf Leggewie (r0lf)]

to make my case once more:
- Debian is more modular, what is the reason we don't follow what upstream does here?
- the size of the package leads to problems as evidenced in bug 1951422 and bug 1951423
- it should be possible to carve out the larger bits into a separate package without making life hard for people who need those bits -> everybody happy

[Juerg Haefliger (juergh)]

Did this work in the past? Can you try older kernels?

[A (zorn-v)]

Are you kidding download 500 Mb if someone changed one line in some config ?

I reverted to debian because of this.
You are mad.