On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 01:49:54AM +0100, Armin K. wrote: > I have noticed that we don't seem to cover firmware installation > anywhere in LFS. The trick is that some modern network cards and most > wireless ones require firmware to function. Radeon cards also require > firmware (most of them does iirc) but we cover that in BLFS. It doesn't > stop there, but I find these 3 cases to be most common ones. > > It would be nice if we included some instructions about firmware in LFS. > > Most of the firmware can be downloaded from kernel.org git repository: > > https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/firmware/linux-firmware.git/tree/ > > Some firmware is shipped in the kernel tree. > > Thoughts? > In the old days, firmware used to be for things which are covered in BLFS.
For radeon, R300 and later require it, but I'm unclear if you need it to get a working KMS framebuffer. On older R600 chips, the firmware was only needed to get Xorg running. On my most recent AMD box, I'm not sure - my notes are ambiguous (or perhaps I'm grepping for the wrong phrase), and I now always build the required firmware. The firmware in the kernel source is only old things, nothing more will be added there (I believe people complained that it wasn't redistributable under the GPL v2). I suppose it is possible to copy the files from kernel.org, but ISTR I had problems when I tried doing that in firefox. For many people, copying a recent tarball from a distro is probably the way to go, and then they can periodically clone linux-firmware once they have built git. At least one of my nics wants the firmware (I've seen error messages when booting without it), but it seemed to work fine without it! I suspect it maybe had an old version. ĸen -- das eine Mal als Tragödie, dieses Mal als Farce -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/lfs-dev FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/faq/ Unsubscribe: See the above information page
