Installing additional firmware

[Achim Patzner]

Hi!

Is it only me or are there some more people who seriously hate having to add firmware for virtual machines? Is there a better way than moving the image into some trustworthy machine, extending it and moving it back to dom0? I’ve been doing this for the sixth time now and I’m getting a bit tired by it. I guess we should petition for adding at least firmware for everything Realtek with USB (and maybe Ralink and Intel) to the standard Qubes installation.


Achim

[Andrew David Wong]

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I'm not sure I understand. Is this some kind of special procedure
required by your particular needs? I don't think I've ever had a need
to install firmware in VMs in that sense. Or, if I did, I was able to
do so via a package manager like yum or dnf.

It's possible that I'm simply ignorant about this topic. (But if
that's true, it's also possible that I'm representative of the
majority of Qubes users, in which case there may not be a pressing
need to accommodate this.)

- --
Andrew David Wong (Axon)
Community Manager, Qubes OS
https://www.qubes-os.org
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[Achim Patzner]

Am 29.05.2016 um 03:31 schrieb Andrew David Wong:
> On 2016-05-28 11:38, Achim Patzner wrote:
> > Hi!
>
> > Is it only me or are there some more people who seriously hate
> > having to add firmware for virtual machines?
>

> I'm not sure I understand.

My mistake. I wanted to write _modules_ and constantly wrote "firmware".
"You should not post at 3 in the morning after 27 hours of work", I guess.

> Is this some kind of special procedure required by your particular needs?

Yes. For some reasons I'm running around with a collection of USB WLAN
devices and I have to install the appropriate drivers (and firmware) for
them whenever I update the kernel. I wouldn't really mind it so much if
they were really exotic hardware but most of them are Ralink and Realtek
based "IT-groceries" found at every corner. This is annoying me quite a bit.


Achim

[Andrew David Wong]

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Ah, I see. Is the Fedora template upgrade procedure applicable? Maybe
it would be easier to make room by bind mounting a temp directory over
/usr/lib/modules as described here:

https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/fedora-template-upgrade-21/

- --
Andrew David Wong (Axon)
Community Manager, Qubes OS
https://www.qubes-os.org
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[Achim Patzner]

Am 29.05.2016 um 23:11 schrieb Andrew David Wong:
> > I'm running around with a collection of USB
> > WLAN devices and I have to install the appropriate drivers (and
> > firmware) for them whenever I update the kernel. I wouldn't really
> > mind it so much if they were really exotic hardware but most of
> > them are Ralink and Realtek based "IT-groceries" found at every
> > corner. This is annoying me quite a bit.
>

> Ah, I see. Is the Fedora template upgrade procedure applicable? Maybe
> it would be easier to make room by bind mounting a temp directory over
> /usr/lib/modules

Which would be a local patch again. I'd like to fix the pain for many
users (who enjoy buying cheap hardware for some unknown reason) ending
up with one of the common off-the-shelf-at-the-grocery-shop devices. "I
wanted to buy some condoms but grabbed a WLAN adapter instead". For some
unknown reason Realtek has released dozens of nearly the same devices
with completely different drivers and nobody consolidated all the
RTL8192[ABCDE][C|U|E] drivers into one. I don't think adding a handfull
of additional drivers would hurt that much and installing the
proprietary firmware (if necessary) isn't that much of a PITA if the
driver module has been included.


Achim