Debian and firmware

https://blog.einval.com/2022/04/19#firmware-what-do-we-do

by pabs3 • 4 years ago

257 177 4 years ago

blog.einval.com

cube002• 4 years ago

As bad as it is in the short term the only way we'll see long term change is to keep the friction on. It's this friction that forces the change of habit to support manufacturers who open their firmware. If it's seamless then there's no incentive to seek out the open option next time you buy.

In my personal case nVidia stopped supporting my graphics card and eventually their binary blob stopped working with the newer Linux kernels so I had to chuck it away.

Now I've learnt the hard way that I'll never by nVidia again (or if I do I'll make sure it's open first). At the time nVidia was getting a lot of good press supporting Linux and I didn't realise that meant closed source blobs that would eventually stop working.

mastax2• 4 years ago

AMD and Intel GPUs also have closed source firmware.

cube002• 4 years ago

As long as the code running on the Linux side is open and the closed source firmware stays on their chip that's fine by me. At least then you have a fighting chance to change the open source side up to date to allow the card to keep working.

I know it's not pure freedom but I'm picking my battles these days and if I can keep something working by bridging the gap between an evolving kernel and static closed firmware then that's good enough for me.

anthk3• 4 years ago

I have an Intel NUC based iGPU and it works with Linux-Libre + MESA. OpenGL and Vulkan. Ok, just libre games/engines, but they with all the FX'.

majormajor2• 4 years ago

As bad as it is in the short term the only way we'll see long term change is to keep the friction on. It's this friction that forces the change of habit to support manufacturers who open their firmware. If it's seamless then there's no incentive to seek out the open option next time you buy.

My experience is the same as the author's: there's more today that needs non-free support to use Linux on the desktop than there was in the past.

So the friction isn't doing its job.

So why bother if the friction is just pushing users to distros which bundle the blobs more directly, instead of pushing manufacturers at all?

hypothesis3• 4 years ago

My experience is the same as the author's: there's more today that needs non-free support to use Linux on the desktop than there was in the past.

Is that a function of Linux Desktop simply being more capable nowadays?

Also, there is a world of difference between not publishing signed closed-source firmware for a driver that does not exist vs having an open source driver with published firmware.

qbasic_forever• 4 years ago

What incentive do manufacturers have to release open firmware? Let's get serious, it's been 20+ years and desktop Linux usage isn't moving the needle or getting any of their attention.

IMHO it would be far better to put effort into change at a different level, like perhaps a broader push with right to repair legislation that expands it to include releasing firmware in addition to schematics, spare parts, etc. Change is going to have to come from a different source, you're just abusing users today for no benefit.

usrn5• 4 years ago

Everyone in the embedded space goes to kernel.org for WiFi stuff (firmware, regulatory info etc) regardless of which OS they're using. Being put at the top of the Wiki because you're "easy to work with" would be a massive advertisement.

NovemberWhiskey2• 4 years ago

the only way we'll see long term change is to keep the friction on

... but there are two possible long term changes, right?

In one of them, the friction incrementally pushes manufacturers not to have proprietary firmware and the number of machines supported by the Debian official install improves.

In the other one, the friction incrementally discourages users from installing Debian, and they either give up on Linux or adopt a distribution that isn't quite so user-hostile.

b5n3• 4 years ago

Depends on how you define 'user-hostile'. There's already a link to the non-free image on the current installation page, and I wouldn't consider respecting your freedoms as hostile.

thrown122• 4 years ago

As bad as it is in the short term the only way we'll see long term change is to keep the friction on. It's this friction that forces the change of habit to support manufacturers who open their firmware. If it's seamless then there's no incentive to seek out the open option next time you buy.

The only friction you're causing is to Debian users. My current laptop is Arch after 5 laptops that ran Debian. My Debian desktop is barely functional with the friendliest AMD GPU to Linux I could find.

By my next update cycle I will be Debian free for the first time in 20 years. Debian needs less friction if it wants to keep me as a user.

dralley• 4 years ago

I doubt that has anything to do with "friction", Debian's release cycle just isn't compatible with wanting to run new hardware. Drivers are distributed via the kernel, Debian uses old kernels and can't afford to do the same kind of hardware enablement backports that Red Hat, SUSE and Canonical can do, so being stuck with the old kernel means poor support for brand new hardware.

Barrin92• 4 years ago

it's this friction that forces the change of habit to support manufacturers who open their firmware.

You can only force anyone to do anything if you have power. If you don't have power you're just a weird guy screaming from a soapbox and people are going to ignore you. No offense but do you think nvidia cares about your boycott? There's no shortage of graphics card buyers.

I assume the non-free version of Debian sees significant amounts of downloads, maybe at this point more than the free version, so the situation is obviously quite awful or this post would not exist.

pabs311• 4 years ago

One way that vendors have released libre firmware is when someone already working on the proprietary firmware convinced their bosses that libre firmware is a good idea. This happened with two of the open WiFi firmware projects.

mastax2• 4 years ago

Almost every hardware device has one or more CPUs on it. As Foone joked, "USB is a standard to let you connect 8051 microcontrollers to PCs." Given the choice between burned-in firmware and externally-loaded firmware, the latter seems clearly superior from an openness perspective. The firmware binary and the loading mechanism opens up the opportunity for reverse engineering, modification, and replacement open firmware.

We currently have a strange situation where the devices that are easy to use are the most open and the most locked down ones, and the middle-ground is punished by policy. If that policy were successful at promoting open firmware I think that would be acceptable, but I don't think I even need to argue that is not the case.

diffeomorphism2• 4 years ago

if that policy were successful at promoting.

Not disagreeing that policies should be made with success in mind. But by the same reasoning "vegan" should include the top 5 most popular meat dishes as exceptions. This would easily make it more popular, more accessible and probably much more successful at reducing meat usage over all. The issue is that the definition of "success" might be entirely unacceptable. Just like "entirely free but...." might be unacceptable.

MrJohz• 4 years ago

In all fairness, flexitarianism is a thing, and I know a lot of people who would never want to go fully vegetarian or vegan, but who want to reduce their meat intake significantly, generally for environmental reasons. The change in messaging from "a single animal death is murder and unacceptable" to "any reduction is good, the more the better" is probably significantly not effective in this context at actually reducing overall meat consumption (although I unfortunately don't have any evidence for that hunch).

trashburger• 4 years ago

If you consider the fact that veganism/vegetarianism is very unhealthy without taking the nutrients you're missing as supplements (which could be argued as being "reverse engineered meat"), then I would suggest that yes, until we reverse engineer the "meat" we should include it in the "diet" (along Free software).

pid-1• 4 years ago

That's what I did.

The first time I tried becoming vegetarian I failed. I often had no reasonable options in restaurants nor social events. Also I live in a country where meat is cheap and barbecues are a key social activity.

Nowadays I still eat meat 0-2 times per week when my choices are limited, but that's much better than eating 14 times per week.

zajio1am• 4 years ago

We currently have a strange situation where the devices that are easy to use are the most open and the most locked down ones, and the middle-ground is punished by policy.

Yes, but that is a result of legal framework, where handling and using independent firmware requires accepting appropriate licences, while handling and using burned-in firmware does not.

dleslie• 4 years ago

What to do? Fund the development of, and provide to top tier support for open hardware and open firmware. Computers aren't just software, after all; Debian drawing the line at software probably needs to end.

3np2• 4 years ago

My 5c: Debian is a free base distro. For users who want an all-batteries-included image including non-free firmware, there are derivatives like Mint and Ubuntu. If someone wants to step up and maintain [Debian+non-free-firmware] releases, this will probably be greatly appreciated but it should not come at the expense of maintaining the rest of Debian and stretching their already thin resources.

One thing that could start paving a path forward would be to make contributing to Debian more approachable... Not saying they should get on GH/GL or anything, but there's huge room for improvement in their existing tools and docs.

genghizkhan• 4 years ago

Debian already maintains these images and has non-free firmware packages. They're just not enabled on the main installation disc by default. You can get non-free Debian images, they're just harder to get to.

Edit: Here we go. They're "unoffical" images for sure, but they seem to be maintained similarly to the official ones. https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/unofficial/non-free/cd-in...

3np2• 4 years ago

Yes, the OP is mentioning those as well. I don't think they, or the non-free repos, are under scope for LTS for example, though?

b5n3• 4 years ago

As a long time Debian user I'm reluctant to criticize developer ergonomics as I'm not an _active_ contributor. That being said, _as a user_, I've not had any issue locating and using non-free firmware when required, and I would be disappointed to see the project change course by including non-free components in an offical manner. Removing the slight inconvenience (literally clicking a link _on the installation page_ and downloading the firmware included image) further dilutes the project's free software position and will encourage users to install software that does not respect their freedoms. If users never brush up against the inconvenience they'll be much less likely to seek out hardware alternatives or even educate themselves on the topic at all, this is damaging to the community as a whole.

I know I'm in the minority, and expect my opinion to be weighted accordingly, but principle is a key factor I use when choosing anything - including software. My loyalty to Debian would be significantly impacted by such a change.

Is Debian missing projected growth KPI's or shedding users? Is this a key hurdle to onboarding new contributors? I'm aware there may be other considerations that those actively participating in the community or leadership may be aware of that I am not, and I might be ignorant to the full value of the proposition. Debian is amazing and I have the upmost respect for everyone involved over the decades, but a move in a direction that weakens its position on non-free components would most likely drive me to using Guix exclusively.

devdao• 4 years ago

Principles matter!

throwaway483752• 4 years ago

They are the only reason I use Debian at all.

ggm3• 4 years ago

I have had some doubts about Dell installs which had non-free blob dependencies which were "insert USB stick and hit enter" -when I am doing remote install via virtual media. Mainly this was for broadcom ethernets.

I found in the end, proceeding to install and then post-install patching was easier but tedious.

If you have access to USB slots, this is a non-problem. If it were possible to find and make and maintain "CD with a bit of the blobset glued in" I'd be happier frankly.

pabs311• 4 years ago

The CDs with blobs have been available for years, the post is mostly about making those CDs the default user experience.

b5n3• 4 years ago

if it were possible to find and make and maintain "CD with a bit of the blobset glued in" I'd be happier frankly.

As mentioned in my original comment, those images already exist, and are linked to on the Debian installation page.

amanwithnoplan• 4 years ago

As a long time non-contributing Debian/Ubuntu user (I hop between the two whenever one of them annoys me too much), I've had a lot of issues locating and using non-free firmware when required.

For the longest time (since fixed), trying to use Wi-Fi in debian-installer simply didn't work, regardless whether I used the unofficial image or dumped the firmware debs on disk. Can't complain about that anymore since it's fixed.

Now that Wi-Fi works when available at install-time, let's try to install a bog standard desktop system. Did you run the text installer or the graphical installer? If you used the text installer, you might be surprised to get an unescapable gray screen on an otherwise fully working booted system! Your video out doesn't work properly because kernel modesetting doesn't work without firmware or some mumbo jumbo like that. Your options are:

- Run the graphical installer in the first place so that the GPU firmware is used/installed by the installer

- Run a shell in the text installer and do "apt-install firmware-blah", a command which is only documented in a dusty unstyled html in a file cabinet hidden by a beware of leopard sign copyrighted 2010

- On boot up, use some relatively arcane GRUB magic (I'm just a user, so I have to look it up every time, okay?) to boot into some kind of safe non-graphical mode and install the GPU firmware

(Bonus: the unofficial firmware-included disc image symlinks the firmware debs, so the image only works when you DD it. The most popular Windows disc writing software Rufus recommends writing disc images in ISO mode (file-by-file) so that you can use excess free space. If you're wondering why the firmware directory has a bunch of 0 byte files, that's why, and you need to switch to DD mode.)

fxtentacle2• 4 years ago

I believe there should be an official non-free repository (akin to Ubuntu's) which users can enable offline, meaning it needs to be stored on the official CD.

Enabling it should display a big scary warning about handing over partial control of your machine to greedy faceless megacorps who will throw you under the bus in a heartbeat if that makes them money. Maybe add an illustration of a robot terminator, to really drive the point home.

Yes, I agree that a default Debian configuration should be clean. But I also know the reality of needing at least Atheros (Wifi), Intel (Ethernet), and NVIDIA firmware blobs to get my tower to boot correctly. Not including any firmware repository on the CD or on a fully installed system is just a recipe for users to get frustrated while they are trying to follow a half-outdated tutorial on one of those spammy tech support blogs.

So in my opinion, the most common blobs should be cached by default, but not activated by default. If the machine boots without them, they can be deleted upon first reboot. If not, we can let the user decide if they are willing to compromise their principles in order to boot the system ;)

mschuster912• 4 years ago

I get the trouble for networking chipsets, but not for the video card - all x86 systems should be able to fall back to ye goode olde days of at least a text console using the old BIOS interface. A default setup of any Linux distribution should in my opinion at least automatically detect if there is something lacking for a framebuffer console or a GUI, and fall back to a plain console.

bayindirh4• 4 years ago

I believe there should be an official non-free repository (akin to Ubuntu's) which users can enable offline, meaning it needs to be stored on the official CD.

There's already a "non-free" section under official "dists" ([0] for stable). It's just not added to the ISOs. Netinstall directly asks that whether you want non-free enabled during installation too.

The only thing is whether building CDs with it or not. Actually there are Zip files containing all firmware for a release, which can be added to a USB drive and added during install, but it's not well documented.

Maybe, this Zip files can be made more prominent, and using them can be better documented. Yes, it's not including firmware in the CD, but it's a good compromise.

What about a nice tool (akin to GRML2USB) which writes the ISO to USB and leaves a mountable FAT32 partition where user can drop in the firmware.zip file, so it becomes self contained if user wants?

[0] http://ftp.tr.debian.org/debian/dists/stable/non-free/

derefr2• 4 years ago

meaning it needs to be stored on the official CD

Wouldn't this imply per-seat IP licenses for things like embedded H.264 software fallback decoding in GPU drivers? I.e. the reason that Ubuntu (that doesn't really care about "proprietary" software by itself) still doesn't ship media codecs on the CD, nor driver blobs that could include them?

techie128• 4 years ago

If users never brush up against the inconvenience they'll be much less likely to seek out hardware alternatives

I think you got it backwards. Users will seek out SOFTWARE alternatives. They're easier to change than the hardware. They're likelier to go the Ubuntu or Linux Mint route than to die on a Debian hill.

jeltz• 4 years ago

Do we? I switched from Dell to Lenovo due to issues with drivers.

marcosdumay4• 4 years ago

I do pick my hardware based on free software support.

Life is too short to depend on people that don't want to support your use-case.

jklinger410• 4 years ago

My loyalty to Debian would be significantly impacted by such a change.

It's so funny that this doesn't affect you at all but merely making the platform more accessible "significantly impacts" your loyalty.

Doesn't that mean your loyalty was conditional anyway? You are ready to jump ship if anything you don't like changes, even if it doesn't have anything to do with your system. Some loyalty.

Hello71• 4 years ago

the generous interpretation of their comment is that their loyalty is predicated on an understanding of shared values; if it transpires that the values are not, in fact, shared, then their relationship may require re-evaluation.

seba_dos12• 4 years ago

Depending on PoV, you can consider incorporating non-free stuff as making it less accessible.

pwdisswordfish9• 4 years ago

Debian is not the sort of project that would use ‘KPI’ unironically.

xioren00• 4 years ago

The non-free version is not official. The last time I used it, it came pre-installed with a bunch of Indonesian language bloat software that it not part of the official Debian install. This is not an acceptable middle ground.

pabs311• 4 years ago

That sounds like an issue that should not happen, please report a bug about it. The non-free version should be identical to the free version except for the installed firmware.

Brian_K_White• 4 years ago

Do not agree. Let the countless others do that.

Can anyone say with a straight face that there is anything wrong with Debian's vision or principles merely existing somewhere in the world?

Ok, so they exist somewhere in the world, in Debian.

And it predates you. Debian didn't come along and fuck up your life. There is no basis for any kind of "take it back" idea to "fix" Debian.

If you don't subscribe to those principles, great news! The entire rest of the world agrees with you! Go use Ubuntu or Mint or really anything.

If your argument is that Debian is an important base for countless users of other distros, and so it's inconsiderate or irresponsible or something not to serve all those indirect users better (according to your personal definition of "better"), well then why ARE so many other distros choosing Debian's shoulders to stand on if it's so unhelpful? All those other distros are perfectly free to provide their own base the "right" way.

You in fact are free yourself to launch a new better os to replace Debian. Go ahead. No one is stopping you. Show those backwards clods how it's done by practical people with their heads screwed on straight.

binkHN• 4 years ago

OpenBSD is in a similar boat and continues to fight the good fight. The developers continue to reach out to the hardware manufacturers to get permission to include firmware in OpenBSD without an NDA. Sometimes they're successful, but, more often than not, they're not. I think if more of the open source community stood steadfast in this regard, more progress could be made here. The saddest part of all this, perhaps, is we're all purchasing hardware that is, basically, useless without the firmware as it's not included with the hardware we purchased.

tedunangst• 4 years ago

OpenBSD kinda does what's proposed here. The firmware packages aren't included in the distribution per se, but they're auto downloaded. It's pretty transparent for users.

jmclnx• 4 years ago

Yes, but one you need these blobs for wireless, you will may to use a wired connection or download them to a flash drive and copy them over.

What OpenBSD seems better, but in many cases, you may need a wired connection for on First Install. Upgrading, no issues but I like to be plugged in anyway just in case wireless drops.

josephcsible• 4 years ago

I'm usually on the FSF's side about everything, but this is one place where I disagree with them and agree with this article. A free OS with free firmware is definitely better than a free OS with proprietary firmware, but both of those are way better than a proprietary OS with proprietary firmware. By making the middle ground difficult, a lot of users have to choose between ideological purity and working hardware, and almost all of them will choose the latter in a big net loss for freedom. (E.g., "What do you mean this Linux thing doesn't support my network card unless I jump through all these hoops? I'll stick with Windows, where it just works out of the box.")

bruce5113• 4 years ago

100% this. A decade ago I needed to replace some internal Linux file servers. I was keen to try ZFS, and so I tried BSD. Naturally on new hardware. Turns out BSD didn't support the on-board ether net. Tried a bunch of network cards from the cupboard, no support their either. Opportunity lost.

Switched to Windows server (and was blown away by how polished that was, but that's another story.)

I get the advantages of free software, I really do, but this sort of neglect of usefulness in the name of ideological purity does not win converts.

On the other hand who cares? Free Software does not need to grow, it fulfils a purpose for those who want to be ideological pure, and I accept that is a valuable thing. Chasing converts at the cost of purity may just end up being no-man's-land.

Perhaps what the author is looking for I'd a debian derivitive, not debian itself?

pabs311• 4 years ago

Debian itself provides the blobs for years, the post is mostly about making those CDs with blobs the default user experience for Debian itself, not for derivatives, some of which provide blobs by default.

jabl4• 4 years ago

On the other hand who cares? Free Software does not need to grow

Sure, there's no VC breathing down the neck of Debian, but arguably the purpose of free software is to provide software freedom for users. If people aren't able to use that free software, it's a bit pointless. Further, a (small) fraction of users grow into developers creating more free software.

To the extent non-free firmware allows more people to use free software, I don't think it's clear at all that a puritan approach to firmware is a net win for software freedom.

jyrkesh• 4 years ago

Switched to Windows server (and was blown away by how polished that was, but that's another story.)

Have you told this story anywhere else already? I'd love to read it. In a past life I worked very close to Windows Server, but I mostly selfhost Linux at home now.

What is it mostly identity related? I miss AD sometimes...or maybe storage? The SMB stack is pretty good too.

einpoklum• 4 years ago

who cares? Free Software does not need to grow, it fulfills a purpose for those who want to be ideological pure,

The point is to turn the tables in software. Free Software needs to grow and expand until it makes sense to say:

who cares? Proprietary software does not need to grow, it fulfills a purpose for those who want to be ideological pure as propertarian/capitalist

and the question is whether to completely ignore anything involving non-free software or not.

ethbr0• 4 years ago

In the end, it should distill down to:

"What is the likelihood of closed-firmware-blob hardware manufacturers changing their behavior because of Debian?"

"What is the likelihood of fewer people using Debian because their installer is more difficult?"

IMHO, the odds aren't good that ideological purity is going to have any net result on hardware manufacturers. So you're really just shooting yourself in the foot so you can feel painfully just.

That said, there are absolutely fights Debian can and should focus on, even if they're painful: ones where there's a chance of victory, and the rewards of victory balance with the risks of the attempt.

totetsu• 4 years ago

Why cant FSF groups just do what FANG do, and make it easy for users in the first place, then once you have them in your walled garden pull the ol' ideological switcharoo.

franga2000• 4 years ago

A free OS with free firmware is definitely better than a free OS with proprietary firmware, but both of those are way better than a proprietary OS with proprietary firmware

How about all three? We have plenty of very good "open with proprietary firmware" distros, many very similar to debian (Ubuntu, PopOS, Mint, Manjaro...), but not that many good "fully open" ones. That is the whole point of distros. If we dilute Debian's fully open philosophy, we don't really gain anything in middle category, but lose one of the few remaining good fully open distros.

To fix your example: "Oh, you say this Debian thing doesn't support my network card? I see why everyone recommended that Pop thing instead, I'll use that then."

Debian is not a friendly distro for users who don't know what they're getting themselves into and that's fine. That's why nobody should (and nobody does) recommend it to Windows users looking for their first Linux distro.

regularfry2• 4 years ago

I think part of the problem is identifying which of those alternatives is closest to "exactly Debian, but without the hardware support problems". You really want something which tracks closely enough that bug reports against packages in that distro could be directly and intentionally accepted by Debian's tracker.

The problem with accepting "Debian is not a friendly distro and that's fine" is that unlesss the snags are addressed, the number of reasons for people to run off to Pop and Ubuntu will only increase over time. Having a friendlier on-ramp to something that is actually Debian is good, but I suspect you could satisfy the "keep Debian pure" requirement with a fairly thin branding layer.

BugsJustFindMe• 4 years ago

Your sentiment is the exact premise behind https://github.com/fiendish/The-Debian-Gotham-Needs

(You can tell from the blurbs on the readme and download page).

pabs311• 4 years ago

Here is a page of open firmware that is known about:

https://wiki.debian.org/Firmware/Open

As you can see, it is very minimal.

tomc1985• 4 years ago

There will always be calls to compromise on principles to maximize some metric or another. There are legions of business wannabes and people who think they know best, and they will sweetly offer up their opinions to tempt you towards what they think is best.

I hope Debian ignores them.

apatheticonion2• 4 years ago

As a Windows/MacOS user who has moved full time to linux, I ended up on Debian Testing as my daily (going to try Fedora soon).

I still live back in the days when Fedora would give you a pop up to install non-free drivers ("additional software" or something like that).

I have been using Debian as my daily driver for almost 6 months now and Linux in general for years - I still have no idea how the video drivers work. I have no idea how to install them, which ones mean what, what's free, non-free, optimal, professional - I have no idea how any of it works and it's a source of frustration for me.

What is mesa? Why do people tell me not to install the video drivers from the Radeon website. When I download and install the drivers from the Radeon website there are lots of errors but it still seems to work - did I install them wrong? How to I update them?

When I install the `apt install firmware-amd-graphics` I get loads of warning, but it works so I ignore them.

What is going on and why isn't it as simple as Window's where I run an executable and a setup wizard does the rest?

diffeomorphism2• 4 years ago

still have no idea how the video drivers work.

Why would you want to? This is not something I want to actually have to care about. And also I absolutely don't have to.

What is going on and why isn't it as simple as Window's where I run an executable and a setup wizard does the rest?

Do you mean the included drivers? Or the OEM ones? Or the Nvidia ones? Current or beta? Also, it is even simpler than that on distros that support nonfree stuff, e.g. on ubuntu it is just click here for which nvidia stuff you want and done. As opposed to navigate websites, versions and wizards in windows.

johnny22• 4 years ago

mesa is the thing that handles opengl and vulkan for most cards that aren't nvidia.

Generally you don't have to touch video drivers at all in linux except for arm stuff and nvidia. (that's not always the case,but mostly) Just keep your kernel up to date. That's the main problem with debian and wanting to say play games or have newer hardware.

Cu3PO42• 4 years ago

The driver situation for modern AMD GPUs is pretty good. There is an open-source `amdgpu` driver in the mainline Linux kernel maintained by AMD themselves. If you use a somewhat recent kernel, that'll be there. You need `mesa` in userspace which provides the OpenGL interface, etc. to your applications.

This is why there's no need to install anything from the Radeon website -- you already have a driver.

As for the `firmware-amd-graphics` package, it provides proprietary firmware for your GPU. That could be as insignificant as microcode updates or an important part of the interface that the driver expects. It's probably a good idea to install (and maybe try and fix the warnings.)

blihp4• 4 years ago

Unless you're running one of the handful of 'officially' supported distros/versions, it really isn't that good yet for at least 6000-series cards. Sure, the upstream video drivers work fine if you just need basic functionality. But if you need more advanced capabilities (i.e. monitoring/managing frequencies/power consumption/etc) or do GPU compute, you're pretty much stuck using the AMD repos which are built for LTS releases of enterprise distros. They can be made to work (with varying degrees of pain) for some releases of desktop distros but it is currently very far from painless.

happymellon3• 4 years ago

What is mesa?

It is the OpenGL and Vulkan libraries. Code calls the Vulkan API, and mesa translates that into something the video driver can handle, which in turn passes the command to the video card.

Why do people tell me not to install the video drivers from the Radeon website.

Because AMD have spent a lot of time and effort getting the drivers in the kernel, and the website drivers are old and no longer the best. There is "AMDGPU Pro" video drivers, which gives you the AMD OpenGL/Vulkan libraries, but they are generally not as good as Mesa as Mesa has everyone working on it.

How to I update them?

AMD have spent a lot of time getting them in the kernel. You update by getting the latest version of Debian, or switching to a distribution that uses a newer kernel.

What is going on and why isn't it as simple as Window's where I run an executable and a setup wizard does the rest?

It is a lot more simple. It is all built in. This is the beauty of collaborative development, AMD and Intel get improvements based upon each others work and they concentrate on giving us better hardware. This is also the reason that AMD works so much better on Linux than Windows, and generally AMD gives Nvidia a run for its money on Linux, at least according to the last benchmarks I saw.

apatheticonion2• 4 years ago

This is great context, this only threw me because when I installed Debian and some other distros, I didn't have any graphics card drivers and was confused why and how to get them.

Because AMD have spent a lot of time and effort getting the drivers in the kernel

Does that mean the drivers are open source?

It is a lot more simple. It is all built in.

When it works. When you have no context (like me) and you are presented with the wrong resolution and no GPU acceleration - It's really hard to find a tl;dr of how to get your graphics card working.

Your comment was literally more valuable than a few hours on the internet trying to disambiguate the situation.

yabones• 4 years ago

You can also use backports to get a newer kernel. I'm on Bullseye which released with 5.10, but you can install 5.16 this way.

    sudo apt install -t bullseye-backports linux-image-amd64

I prefer this to running testing, since I still want reliable and prompt security patches.

blihp4• 4 years ago

Setting aside the ideological arguments, the primary reason you should not be installing video drivers, or any other device drivers, outside of what your distro has packaged (if you can help it) is that they have an annoying tendency to break when you do a version upgrade leaving you with, if you're lucky, only the ability to log in via the command line or ssh. Worst case, you can end up with an entirely hosed install. Even if they work (for now), keeping them in sync with the rest of your system can be an exercise in frustration.

As someone who is currently dealing with proprietary AMD drivers (and previously proprietary nVidia drivers) on Debian testing, it's pretty much only a matter of time before things will break... you've been warned but I understand if you need to do it anyways (as I do for compute support with AMD currently.) I'm very much looking forward to the day when we have Debian packages (at least in the non-free repo) for current AMD GPU compute stuff.

Maursault• 4 years ago

I hesitate to post, but I respect Debian. Firmware has gotten so large, all distributions and OS communities would benefit from focusing on it as a project to provide free firmware. I don't know how large the firmware developer community is. Firmware space has gotten so large, an entire OS could fit in there. What if there were a miniDebian, or miniFreeBSD, that was a virtuous but smaller reflection of the OS, not unlike iOS and macOS? I'm not sure if crypto or key signing by hw makers, under the excuse of security, makes this impossible, but I'd really like to have more options with the firmware on my machines. Like, why can't I run VMWare ESXi from firmware? It should fit in there. If if is technically possible, it should be allowed; we pay for the hardware, it belongs to us. Why is this even a thing? Who are the bad guys here? Why are they screwing with us?

mschuster912• 4 years ago

The amount of people capable of doing firmware work is extremely low, and the amount of documentation available that's needed to write firmware for highly embedded systems is even lower - not to mention that the stuff that is implemented in this kind of firmware is extremely complex and if anything RF is involved it gets even hairier because of compliance to standards and legal regulations. Last thing an open source dev wants is complaints from users that their home got raided by the FCC for operating a noisy transmitter that interrupts service for someone else.

There isn't even enough manpower to get the Raspberry Pi, the world's most used embedded system for tinkerers, a fully blob-free experience - it's madness to expect that for systems like GPUs that are orders of magnitude more complex than that.

outsomnia3• 4 years ago

The canonical firmware is the BIOS, I was pleasantly surprised when Fedora updated the BIOS on my Dell XPS device by itself recently... historically that has been somewhere between a nuisance (Reboot and then UEFI network update), a struggle (dig out the image from an EXE on a flash drive), or impossible (some windows-only app that doesn't work via a VM). And whatever the annoyance level, when done manually it was usually done months or years after the BIOS release.

Other firmware the cpu microcode is handled via packaging.

There has been a lot of work packaging peripheral firmware for things like mice... it's not like it is going to go away. This is also distributed in packaging in Fedora now.

It's not ideal that these are proprietary blobs but some accommodation is needed I think.

pabs311• 4 years ago

That firmware update was made possible by the fwupd software project (containing various firmware updaters) and the LVFS project, a service for hardware vendors to upload their proprietary firmware updates for mice, the BIOS/UEFI and other devices to.

https://fwupd.org/

While it is great, it doesn't solve the problem that this post is talking about; when devices have no pre-installed firmware and expect you to upload (proprietary) firmware on every boot. This is usually things like WiFi chips, GPUs, Ethernet etc.

outsomnia3• 4 years ago

it doesn't solve the problem that this post is talking about; when devices have no pre-installed firmware and expect you to upload (proprietary) firmware on every boot. This is usually things like WiFi chips, GPUs, Ethernet etc.

Same as Fedora, Debian seems to package linux-firmware?

https://packages.debian.org/sid/firmware-misc-nonfree

molticrystal• 4 years ago

Due to these reasons, more and more devices in a typical computer now need firmware to be uploaded at runtime for them to function correctly. This has grown:
Going back 10 years or so, most computers only needed firmware uploads to make WiFi hardware work.

You can actually go back to almost 30 years with dialup modems, most notably the winmodem/softmodem popularizing this concept in the pc market. If there is anything to blame on this path of binary blobs, I'd fault them.

CogitoCogito• 4 years ago

Installing the non-free firmware on Debian is as easy or easier than similar installation on all other operating systems. So this is really a complaint about something that is almost as easy as it gets needing to be just slightly easier. It’s making a mountain out of a molehill.

That said, who cares if some users want it? Debian doesn’t aim to serve all users’ needs. Those who want non-free firmware bundled with the operating system can get that with one of the many Linux-based (or non Linux-based) operating systems out there. Debian just isn’t for those users. That’s fine.

comex• 4 years ago

Is the situation really that different from how it used to be? At least for me personally, if I compare to around 2008 or so when I had Debian installed as the primary OS on a desktop PC and as a toy on my Mac laptop:

Modern laptops normally don't come with wired ethernet now.

Both then and now, on my laptop, I use Ethernet occasionally but rarely, only when I specifically need its speed or reliability advantages. The rest of the time I use Wi-Fi, which did and does require non-free firmware. Ethernet moved from a built-in port to a dongle, but my actual usage patterns have barely changed.

That said, there used to be some Wi-Fi chips that didn't require non-free firmware (just not the ones I had), whereas now there are none.

For desktops, on the other hand, it was and is worth hooking up Ethernet, making the point largely moot. (I think I used Wi-Fi on my desktop at the time, but I wished I didn't have to. Now I don't.)

There won't be any usable graphics on the laptop's screen.

Even at the time, I saw hardware-accelerated graphics as essential, both for windowing (Compiz) and for gaming. So I used the 'nvidia' non-free driver on the PC… just as I do now. (I don't remember what the Mac had.)

Incidentally, for those who don't prioritize graphics performance over freedom, free drivers are better than they used to be. Unfortunately, they require non-free firmware – and I know this post is about firmware. But still… that seems like a win of some sort.

guilhas3• 4 years ago

The installation asks you yes/no if you want to install non-free firmware

p0d3• 4 years ago

Tbh I don't care about free, non-free firmware. This was not my install issue.

guilhas3• 4 years ago

There is a similar model notes in the wiki

InstallingDebianOn HP Envy 14 Beats Edition 2020ep https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/HP/Envy%2014%20Be...

The installer isn't able to detect the Wifi or LAN network cards. To do a net install from the LAN card you need to drop to a shell and do

modprobe atl1c echo "1969 1083" > /sys/bus/pci/drivers/atl1c/new_id

shmerl2• 4 years ago

It is annoying for sure, that for something like AMD GPU you have to go out of the way to get a "non official" Debian installer that includes amdgpu firmware, otherwise installer won't be able to work.

For the most part this annoyance affects the installation step. After your system is in some semi-working state where you at least can install packages or have access to network, you can add any firmware you want already.

p0d3• 4 years ago

Pretty sure this is what I did on my second attempt and still had the same issues. Could be wrong though. HP Envy 14-eb0 laptop.

shmerl2• 4 years ago

A good incentive to learn how to just create customized installer with some additional packages included. Should be doable using Debian tools.

teddyh• 4 years ago

The problem of non-free firmware has been solved, already. If you need it, you simply download the image which contains it:

https://fiendish.github.io/The-Debian-Gotham-Needs/

p0d3• 4 years ago

I am a 20yr linux user. I got a new HP laptop recently and decided to try Debian. To my surprise Debian didn't recognise my network adapter and would not let me continue the installation. I wrongly assumed the installer would install, let me fix the adapter.

I read around and used an installer which apparently had proprietary drivers. Same issue, couldn't install.

At this stage I returned to Ubuntu.

pabs311• 4 years ago

LWN discussion about this post:

https://lwn.net/Articles/891767/

wheelerof4te• 4 years ago

Debian is the only Linux distro with a sane release cycle left. Every other Linux distribution feels like alpha or beta software.

the_biot• 4 years ago

It's a shame that there's barely even a conversation about fixing the problem of the ever growing pile of proprietary firmware blobs; more and more often people seem to just accept the situation.

There isn't AFAIK an organisation or project dedicated to producing free firmware to replace the blobs. The most you see is the occasional project for making firmware for a single chip. Debian's page lists these: https://wiki.debian.org/Firmware/Open It's a depressingly short list.

I guess the problem is in part that there's no money to fund anyone for doing such (very hard) work, and no incentive for companies to pay for it.

marcosdumay4• 4 years ago

It's not really growing. They just used to come inside the device, and now they are changing into the distro. That's an improvement, just not as big one as it could be.

m0llusk• 4 years ago

Non free firmware is a huge ongoing problem for me. I am posting this from a laptop that has some major failings because of the lack of updated firmware.

Slightly apart from the main issue here I would suggest that there is an opportunity for communication with some of the parties that matter most. Producing media that shows how much happier customers are with products that have freely available firmware with updates might convince some manufacturers to change their ways. If it were clear that power users would direct purchasing for whole organizations based in part on availability of firmware then there would be a clear profit motive for doing that. At this time makers see providing firmware as an expense and a risk that only diminishes their position.

hedora• 4 years ago

More importantly, going to debian.org/shop should provide a list of best-of-current-generation hardware devices that work flawlessly without setting the kernel taint bit, covering a dozen hardware niches:

- router

- NAS

- thin and light laptop

- cheap laptop

- beast of a CPU laptop

- gaming laptop

- ml laptop

- low wattage compact desktop / htpc

- workstation

- gaming desktop

- tablets, watches, phones, etc.

- handheld portable gaming system (e.g. rk2020, steam deck, odin pro)

To get on the list, manufacturers would have to commit to making a Linux SKU that does not change (modulo hardware bugfixes) for 3-5 years. PC Engines alrady does this for routers; Pine does it for cheap laptops; AMD GPU gaming desktops are also an easy target.

They'd also need to donate a few dev / continuous integration machines to the project (or operate them themselves). Each night, these machines would automatically confirm that all hardware devices are working right in top of trunk and all contemporary supported releases.

There could be revenue sharing, or not. Don't care.

yyyk• 4 years ago

My subjective impression is that Debian has been losing ground, especially against Arch. I don't think firmware is the main issue - the complex packaging method and the contradictory nature of Debian 'testing' are the main issues. Yet this change will help, so I'm in favour.

guilhas3• 4 years ago

Why should Debian/Linux and users reward hardware that goes out of their way to make everyone's life worse for profit?

Maybe hardware companies should make an effort to contribute and make their hardware work better on Linux

When I buy a laptop I make sure it is Linux/Debian/Arch... compatible

Extra I go on eBay and get a cheap compatible open source driver WiFi card, like QCNFA335 to replace the original

Debian and firmware

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