[Nix-dev] SVN commit: nix - r31502 - in nixos/trunk/modules: . hardware

[Arie Middelkoop]

Sorry for replying a bit late. The emailadres of my svn account is no
longer valid, so I only notice it by going through the email on the list.

> Also, I'm used to placing firmware that I want installed into the
> > hardware.firmware option, like this:
> >
> >    hardware.firmware = [ pkgs.firmwareLinuxNonfree ];
>

Sure. That's what I did in the beginning. The purpose of having a Boolean
switch would just make it easier for an end-user to turn all available
firmware of kernel.org on, as Eelco said:


> Yeah, in general having options to enable a single package is not a good
> idea.  However I think it would be very useful to have an option
> ‘hardware.enableAllFirmware’ (...Firmwares?) that enables all firmware
> packages (including pkgs.firmwareLinuxNonfree).  This would be very
> useful on the installation CD and for users who want things to Just Work.
>

Feel of course free to rename any options or names that I chose :)
For now, I simply took the name of the upstream package, but a more
simple/general name would be preferable.

I agree that on the one hand it is nicer to have individual packages for
individual hardware. On the other hand, firmware doesn't really benefit
from that.
Note that the disk space used by the firmware binaries is negligible, and
more importantly: firmware is only loaded when the kernel module that needs
it passes its name to some API function. Thus, unused firmware will not
even be read by the kernel.
Also note that these firmwares belong to kernel modules that belong to a
particular kernel version, so you better make sure that they are all of the
same version.


> P.S. I suggested to Arie that we should use the Debian firmware packages
> in NixOS, since they've done the hard work of gathering all these
> firmwares and keeping them up to date.  These are:
>
>   http://packages.debian.org/source/sid/firmware-nonfree
>
> and
>
>   http://packages.debian.org/source/sid/firmware-free


Yes. I first fetched them directly from a git repo from kernel.org, but
that is problematic by itself. I'm now using the source distributions.
Eelco also suggested taking the firmware from the binary packages. That
will ultimately be a nicer solution because it seems that a small subset of
the firmware is located wrongly in the source distribution and thus cannot
be found by their respective modules.
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