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

[Thierry Vignaud]

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