linux-firmware not installed by default in the installer environment

[James M. Leddy]

Broadcom ethernet require firmware to operate. Without this firmware installed on the default image, the installer will not be able to get networking and halt prompting the user. This means that the ubuntu-server installation CD will be unusable on a large number of server systems, anything that uses broadcom ethernet. One way to fix this is include linux-firmware as part of cdrom-retreiver.

Here is a snippet of the syslog from a failed installation:

Mar 20 19:40:13 net/hw-detect.hotplug: Detected hotpluggable network interface eth1
Mar 20 19:40:13 kernel: [ 101.680106] bnx2x 0000:01:00.1: eth1: Broadcom NetXtreme II BCM57810 10 Gigabit Ethernet (B0) PCI-E x8 5GHz (Gen2) found at mem da000000, IRQ 36, node addr 18:03:73:fd:b4:a6
Mar 20 19:40:13 kernel: [ 101.705273] bnx2x: [bnx2x_init_firmware:10574(eth1)]Can't load firmware file bnx2x/bnx2x-e2-7.0.29.0.fw
Mar 20 19:40:13 kernel: [ 101.705279] bnx2x: [bnx2x_func_hw_init:5382(eth1)]Error loading firmware
Mar 20 19:40:13 kernel: [ 101.705292] bnx2x: [bnx2x_nic_load:1823(eth1)]HW init failed, aborting
Mar 20 19:40:13 kernel: [ 102.056675] bnx2x: [bnx2x_init_firmware:10574(eth0)]Can't load firmware file bnx2x/bnx2x-e2-7.0.29.0.fw
Mar 20 19:40:13 kernel: [ 102.056683] bnx2x: [bnx2x_func_hw_init:5382(eth0)]Error loading firmware
Mar 20 19:40:13 kernel: [ 102.056696] bnx2x: [bnx2x_nic_load:1823(eth0)]HW init failed, aborting
Mar 20 19:40:14 check-missing-firmware: /dev/.udev/firmware-missing does not exist, skipping
Mar 20 19:40:14 check-missing-firmware: missing firmware files (bnx2x/bnx2x-e2-7.0.29.0.fw) for bnx2x

[James M. Leddy (jm-leddy)]

Here is a screenshot from check-missing-firmware

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

As discussed on IRC, linux-firmware is intentionally not installed due to being a .deb, but nic-firmware and scsi-firmware (which are .udebs) are.

The particular issue at hand here has been fixed in the linux-firmware source package (bug 944108). If you encounter further problems with files in linux-firmware not being available during installation, please file them against linux-firmware rather than against the installer.