Comment 15 for bug 1305839

Hi,

I think everyone is largely aligned with the freedom aspects of this. This is certainly not a concern for myself at least.

What is concerning to me, is that this feature feels rushed and somewhat unfinished. I just had a quick look at the code that landed for this feature:

There is no support for third party drivers in enlistment, commissioning or fastpath/curtin. I am guessing the first two can be ignored, depending on the nature of the driver; but the fastpath seems a big loss.

The drivers.yaml file is a monolithic file that ships with the code-base. I might have expected this to be a yaml per-driver file, allowing easier stacking, probably managed via an external mechanism (simplestream?). I am guessing drivers.yaml would appear to be a config file that I can maintain as a sysadmin. Am I allowed to add extra modalias as new hardware comes out, myself? What about third party drivers I wish to add? What experience should I expect on upgrade? This, if added now, feels like something that is needlessly hard to upgrade from.

It seems the binary drivers udeb for the reference implementation is pulled from both plain http (via wget, without validating against a signed Release file), AND when the PPA is added the signing key is also retrieved over plain http. This would imply a trust failure on both parts of this.

It matches the kernel of the current install. Assuming that the pxe installer is still using the netboot from the current installer, is there any assurance that without warning - installs will suddenly stop working, until the third-party repository has updated it?

The modalias matching seems to be quite nice. It looks like I can only support one third party driver per node. Is there likely to be a scenario where multiple drivers may be required?

Only amd64 is supported as part of this feature. Is it not anticipated that other arches will require third-party drivers?

I don't think the archive pocket matters weather this is Universe or Main. By current process, the only thing moving to Universe would achieve is removal from the install media (which could equally be done if in main). Meaning that squeezing in prior to release is even less relevant.

HWE Kernel FFe bug 1281765, is left unfinished. Is this something also planned to land?

To be clear, I am not against this feature. I was proposing that if landed as a HWE feature post release, where this can be fully implemented without encumbering the upgrade process to be needlessly complicated.