Slax author's Blog (RSS)

Kernel firmware

Thanks to several comments on this blog I finally discovered the reason why Slackware ships a distinct package kernel-firmware instead of using the firmware from vanila kernel. Basically it is because the vanila kernel has only very small set of drivers, about 2MB of data, while Slackware uses this git tree as a source, which provides about 40MB of additional firmwares from different sources. Compressed Slax bundle with all the firmware drivers is 20MB, that's huge.

I'm now facing a decision. Should I include this in Slax? It will surely make a lot of users more happy since their devices will start working out of the box. Is Slax intended for such uses? Yes it is, it should run on as much hardware as possible. But still it's so huge...

If there could be at least some description what firmware is for what device, that could help us delete firmwares which are very rarely needed, for example if some fw is only used on some special router boxes, then most likely no Slax user will need those at all... and so on. But I didn't find any such description of the files anywhere.

For now, the decision is not made.

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