On Wed, Oct 1, 2025, at 2:19 PM, Tim via users wrote: > On Wed, 2025-10-01 at 13:36 -0400, Chris Murphy wrote: >> we're stuck with the explosive increase in size of all firmware >> generally, but this time around nvidia really got a lot bigger due to >> the addition of just a couple of firmware files. > > Just out of interest (since I only have NVidia on an ancient laptop), > they used to have separate packages for different families of cards, > and I would assume that new firmware would only be included for the > relevant cards. I wouldn't have thought that made for a huge increase > unless a package support code for a plethora of cards. > > Are they including firmware updates inside driver packages?
No. I'm not exactly sure how this works but there is a meta package linux-firmware-20250917-2.fc42 you can see here https://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/buildinfo?buildID=2832993 And it contains a bunch of rpms. Any Fedora variant that installs the meta package gets all the rpms in that list. As I understand it. The desktops get the meta package and other variants specify the firmware rpms they need directly. I also have no idea how dracut knows what to include or not include. But the nohostonly/generic/rescue initramfs (the big one) has all the gpu firmware in it. And then only those systems that need the detected firmware, get it replicated in the hostonly initramfs's. Hence the sizes are getting big fast - all the replication through multiple initramfs's of the same file. > And is that re-flashing the firmware in cards (I couldn't see that > necessitating an increased initramfs, that could just be something that > ran when the package installed), or are they simply loading new code as > the OS boots, each time? It's stored in volatile memory. I don't know where the firmware goes exactly, if it's in logic board or graphics card memory. Therefore it gets loaded on every boot. Also there is a temporal component when the firmware must be available to the graphics card. I don't know anything about that either, except that it is apparently not sufficient to have the firmware load at a much later time. Hence the demand to put it in the initramfs so it's available when the graphics card is initialized by the kernel driver. I think. -- Chris Murphy -- _______________________________________________ users mailing list -- [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected] Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/[email protected] Do not reply to spam, report it: https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure/new_issue
