[Mageia-dev] [RFC] radeon firmware in non-free

Wed May 30 10:38:02 CEST 2012

Hi
+
+I think we must discuss the following point for next release:
+currently radeon firmwares are in non-free.
+
+However this break havoc quite a lot of install b/c by default
+non-free is not enabled.
+
+1) This makes the Mageia experience horrible on some machines
+    (black screen, machines unusable by newbies (and worse
+    unrecoverable by newbies), ...)
+    Newer ATI/AMD cards cannot work w/o the needed firmware.
+    That's also the issue with several network cards.
+    (which makes network installation impossible by default)
+
+2) this is unlike the live-cd where we've those firmwares (and
+    the proprietary drivers as well)
+
+3) This is unlike other "pure" FOSS distro such as Fedora
+     which includes the firmwares.
+
+So there're two kinds of Linux distro:
+- those who provides free & proprietary drivers
+- those who only provides free drivers, with the needed firmwares
+
+Mageia choose to provides either the first experience (the live cd
+case) or the worst one, the free drivers w/o the needed firmwares.
+
+A lot of thing broke havoc when firmwares get split from kernels.
+According to their licence (or their lack of license), we choose
+to distribute them in:
+- either kernel-firmware, always available and always installed
+- or kernel-firmware-nonfree, unavailable and not installed by default
+
+This make a lot of free drivers stop to work by default (at least with
+the classic installer, it's OK with the livecd)
+
+So we offer the choice between:
+- either be able to choose between working proprietary driver and
+  working free driver
+- or to have non working free driver
+This is _INSANE_.
+
+I think It's time we reconsider this.
+
+Firmwares do not run on the main CPU.
+They're needed for additional chips where no one will ever
+ever write a program for.
+>From the main CPU/memory view point they're data.
+
+I think we should offer the choice to:
+- either be able to choose between working proprietary driver and
+  working free driver
+- or to have _working_ free driver
+  (that is including the needed firmwares)
+
+See you
+