[elrepo] [elrepo-devel] Broken kmod-compat-wireless package

[Phil Perry]

On 25/08/12 01:58, Manuel Wolfshant wrote:
> On 08/25/2012 12:18 AM, Phil Perry wrote:
>> Ah, there are no firmwares as part of the kmod-compat-wireless package
>> - it just provides the drivers.
>>
>> We do now have a firmware package that will provide these files for you:
>>
>> http://elrepo.org/linux/elrepo/el6/x86_64/RPMS/bcm43xx-firmware-0.0-1.el6.elrepo.noarch.rpm
>>
>>
>> Question - we can make the firmwares packages a dependency of the
>> kmod-compat-wireless package so when one installs kmod-compat-wireless
>> it will also pull in all the firmwares, but this will literally pull
>> in *all* firmwares, not just the firmware for your specific device.
>>
>> We were planning to do this, but haven't done it yet. Good idea or
>> not? The plus side is you hopefully get the required firmware
>> automatically installed. The downside is you get a bunch of files
>> installed on your system that aren't in any way relevant to your system.
>>
>
> If the size on disk is not "too big", I say do it. People expect things
> to work automagically.
> We took the same approach for the CentOS minimal.iso: all the packages
> that provide support for hardware susceptible to be used on a server (
> ex: Wi-Fi is excluded but aacraid, Brocade & FCOE support is included )
> get installed even if a few of them would not be needed for that
> specific server.
>

The size shouldn't be overly large as firmware are generally small in 
size and many of them are probably already installed on end users 
systems (see below).

I put together a virtual package for compat-wireless-firmware that pulls 
in all the distro firmware packages plus any additional firmware 
packages we have packaged:

https://github.com/elrepo/packages/blob/master/compat-wireless-firmware/el6/compat-wireless-firmware.spec

http://elrepo.org/linux/elrepo/el6/x86_64/RPMS/compat-wireless-firmware-3.5-1.el6.elrepo.noarch.rpm

I'm sure there's still some missing firmwares but we can add them on a 
case by case basis as users identify them. Some that are extracted from 
binary drivers using fwcutter we can't redistribute.

So the package is there in the repo, just I didn't add a Requires for it 
yet. Strangely, even the distro kernel-firmware package isn't required 
by anything so users can end up without it installed (so we added a 
requires for that too):

$ rpm -q kernel-firmware
kernel-firmware-2.6.32-279.5.2.el6.noarch

$ rpm -q --whatrequires kernel-firmware
no package requires kernel-firmware

On RHEL6, some firmwares are provided by the kernel-firmware package and 
others are provided by individual firmware packages such as many of the 
iwlwifi firmwares.


On my test system, yum wants to install 2.9MB of additional firmware for 
compat-wireless-firmware:

# yum install compat-wireless-firmware

Dependencies Resolved

================================================================================
  Package                      Arch       Version 
Repository   Size
================================================================================
Installing:
  compat-wireless-firmware     noarch     3.5-1.el6.elrepo     elrepo 
    2.7 k
Installing for dependencies:
  ath9k_htc-firmware           noarch     1.3-1.el6.elrepo     elrepo 
     45 k
  bcm43xx-firmware             noarch     0.0-1.el6.elrepo     elrepo 
    874 k
  iwl100-firmware              noarch     39.31.5.1-1.el6      os 
    125 k
  iwl6000g2a-firmware          noarch     17.168.5.3-1.el6     os 
    144 k
  iwl6000g2b-firmware          noarch     17.168.5.2-1.el6     updates 
    150 k
  rt2860-firmware              noarch     26-1.el6.elrepo      elrepo 
    6.9 k
  rt2870-firmware              noarch     22-1.el6.elrepo      elrepo 
    6.2 k

Transaction Summary
================================================================================
Install       8 Package(s)

Total download size: 1.3 M
Installed size: 2.9 M
Is this ok [y/N]: