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

Wed May 30 11:13:14 CEST 2012

On 30 May 2012 10:38, Thierry Vignaud <thierry.vignaud at gmail.com> wrote:
+> 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 https://bugs.mageia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3466
+
+Likewise, fedora package AMD/Intel microcode for their CPUs
+whereas we put them in non-free, which makes microcode_ctl to
+not work by default
+See https://bugs.mageia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4327
+