Samuel Thibault <sthiba...@debian.org> (2021-08-22): > As mentioned in the Bullseye errata, there seems to be a number of > sound cards that require loading a firmware to be able to emit sound > (e.g. Intel SOF). Unfortunately currently the installer loads firmware > after loading the ISO image, while speech synthesis is needed at the > very first interaction with the user, which is usually before that. We'd > thus want (for the firmware-enabled image) to include firmware in the > initrd somehow.
For context, that's sof I was fighting with: https://tracker.debian.org/news/1245087/accepted-hw-detect-1147-source-into-unstable/ > We discussed a bit on IRC, possibly we could just, at debian-cd step, > catenate the cpio archives, or unpack/assemble/repack, or ship several > initrds. Let's clarify a little: - Shipping several initrds would probably mean having an empty, placeholder-like “extrastuff.gz” set by the debian-installer build, that we would replace with some firmware-containing initrd for some builds in debian-cd; that would mean that src:debian-installer would still be responsible for setting up the relevant bootloader config, instead of having part of it in debian-installer, and another part in debian-cd. - But I don't think that's required, adjusting the initrd in debian-cd should be far easier. I thought about the “combine archives” part and smcv confirmed we should just be able to cat (compressed) CPIO archives together. I've tried the following with a netboot-gtk build (easier than trying to edit a firmware-enabled ISO :D), keeping in mind my cpio-speak is rusty: dpkg -x firmware-sof-signed_1.7-1_all.deb tmp (cd tmp; find lib | cpio -Hnewc -o) | gzip -9 > ~/debian-installer/installer/build/firmware-sof-signed.cpio.gz cd ~/debian-installer/installer patch -p1 < ~/0001-Talk-to-me.patch make -C build/ rebuild_netboot-gtk USE_UDEBS_FROM=bullseye I have *not* conducted extended testing, but that still boots successfully within qemu with -soundhw all, and speaks when using the 's' shortcut for speech synthesis. And once booted on my sof-enabled laptop, it starts speaking, so I suppose that's a successful PoC; next step is to confirm whether tweaking debian-cd to do the cat dance looks good to Steve as well. Cheers, -- Cyril Brulebois (k...@debian.org) <https://debamax.com/> D-I release manager -- Release team member -- Freelance Consultant
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