On Friday, December 9, 2022, Adam Williamson <adamwill(a)fedoraproject.org>
wrote:
> On Fri, 2022-12-09 at 12:04 +0100, Florian Weimer wrote:
> > * Richard W. M. Jones:
> >
> > > You only need network / wifi firmware blobs (although I'm sure they
> > > are in themselves large) and then you can fetch anything else needed
> > > for the hardware including graphics, right?
> >
> > I think you need graphics to set up wifi.
>
> Yeah, this is an awkward chicken-and-egg problem. Even if we assume
> you're on a wired network, kernel modules generally - AIUI - try to
> load the firmware once, on initial module load, and if they can't find
> it, just give up, right? So we still have an ordering problem: how can
> we delay the loading of modules that need firmware until the network is
> up for us to be able to access the firmware files?
>
> Maybe I'm missing something that would help there, but it seems
> tricky...
>
> Looking at sizes, iwlwifi firmware alone is 75M(!) ath10k is 6.8M,
> ath11k is 12M, ath6k is 812K, so that's nearly another 20M. brcm/ is
> another 6.4M and I *think* that's all wifi. There's a few other minor
> ones, but that's a little over 100M of just wifi, with Intel by a huge
> margin the worst offender.
>
> Does anyone know anyone we can talk to at Intel about this? It's pretty
> obnoxious.
>
> In terms of what the other big space takers are in general:
>
> * amdgpu/ (AMD video cards) is ~20M
> * intel/ (mainly Intel bluetooth) is ~15M [0]
> * qed/ (some very high-end QLogic network cards) is ~10M [0]
> * i915/ (Intel video firmware) is 8.4M
> * mediatek/ is 7.7M [1]
> * qcom/ is 7.3M
>
> Then it trails off from there. Just the wifi plus those 6 things are
> around 170M, so the large majority of all the space taken.
>
> [0] No, we can't lose this - people install with Bluetooth
> mice/keyboards
> [1] For a quick win right now possibly we could assume nobody's going
> to use one of those as the interface for a Fedora install and drop
> that, not sure if it's a safe assumption
>
It's not given that AMD wifi is rebranded mediatek, meaning it will drop
wifi for lots of newer AMD laptops.