Source: installation-guide Severity: important X-Debbugs-Cc: debian-rele...@lists.debian.org, isenk...@packages.debian.org
[ RT and isenkram maintainers in the loop for information ] Hi, This bug report is about the first part of the proposal outlined in this other bug report: https://bugs.debian.org/989863 which is trying to be a bit more helpful regarding firmware problems. Looking at the amd64 documentation, there are several places where firmware is mentioned: - 2.1.5, which basically points at 2.2. → https://www.debian.org/releases/bullseye/amd64/ch02s01#gfx - 2.2, which pretends graphics cards should work at least minimally (which tends not to be true), and which also points at 6.4. → https://www.debian.org/releases/bullseye/amd64/ch02s02 - 6.4, which documents a number of things. → https://www.debian.org/releases/bullseye/amd64/ch06s04 At first glance, I'm proposing: - not to change 2.1.5; - to amend 2.2, mentioning graphics cards might be problematic, and mentioning nomodeset as a possible workaround (plus another pointer at 6.4 right after that); → https://salsa.debian.org/installer-team/installation-guide/-/commit/09375ab4dfd366560d86bda554cd8d89c8920294 - to extend 6.4, mentioning nomodeset again (for people who haven't seen 2.2 first), as well as an automated way to detect and install missing firmware. → https://salsa.debian.org/installer-team/installation-guide/-/commit/ed2ec80f30e4a024ed5d061e03251af5f7a28e00 For now, both commits are in a pu/firmware-v0 branch in the installation guide repository. I'm not very used to best practices when it comes to end-user doc in general and to the installation-guide package in general, so I'd be happy for other to build on those suggested changes, and amend/reword as required! Some remarks: - There's a copy-paste for the “nomodeset” option, which I suppose could be avoided with some include logic. This might avoid duplicate works on the l10n front (which might be important due to the next point). - This is a *possible* workaround, as I have not been able to test it (I couldn't reproduce the black screen issue with test hardware). I plan to have some kind of survey organized to see if people affected by this issue can confirm. - 6.4.1 points at `unofficial/non-free/firmware/` which have been made to work out of the box (as much as possible) as detailed in #989863, but “the archive (tar or zip) on a separate support” use case wasn't tackled yet (in particular detecting graphics firmware might be required, even if the installer didn't spot that on its own due to using generic drivers). I don't think it makes sense to document that separately, as we might improve this in a point release, and the “nomodeset workaround” + “isenkram procedure” combination should be enough to fix things up from the installed system. - I documented in a note what happens with that “isenkram procedure” since mentioning non-free seemed to be the bare minimum. We might skip mentioning contrib though (see earlier note in 6.4.2; the logic is exactly the same though — same code!). - Documenting what isenkram-autoinstall-firmware does means we should check what happens for each major release, to keep up with the current implementation. Doing that once every two years doesn't seem unreasonable though. Cheers, -- Cyril Brulebois (k...@debian.org) <https://debamax.com/> D-I release manager989863 -- Release team member -- Freelance Consultant
