Add a discussion of firmware updates

[ken@…]

I originally proposed this for BLFS, at ​http://lists.linuxfromscratch.org/pipermail/blfs-dev/2015-March/029780.html and I thought that Bruce had suggested putting it into LFS, but now I cannot find that.

This is primarily for cpu microcode updates and firmware for radeon devices newer than R200 (currently covered in BLFS under the Xorg ATI driver, but needed for the radeon KMS driver in the kernel, but also for firmware for various wired network drivers (those seem to work without it) and for wifi devices.

[ken@…]

Link to Bruce's clarified suggestion: ​http://lists.linuxfromscratch.org/pipermail/blfs-dev/2015-March/029790.html

I'll sketch up a plan to put a new page in chapter 8, between "Creating the /etc/fstab File" and "Linux-${CURRENTKERNELVERSION}". Might need some iterations, do not hold your breath waiting for it.

[ken@…]

Working through what I've got, and checking details - at the moment the BLFS Xorg ATI driver links to Alex Deuchar's freedesktop page but the firmware is now in linux-firmware (and some has been updated compared to Alex's page, BLFS ticket 6364)

I still need to sort out the best way to get the intel stuff, then I'll put up a view of how to handle this.

I did wonder if we ought to do like the distros, and create our own tarball from linux-firmware browser link ​https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/firmware/linux-firmware.git/ because that is a bit hard to navigate the first time.

But I pulled linux firmware yesterday, and after copying the files (cp -a * dest/), and catting git log into another file (to get rid of the voluminous .git files) the resulting .tar.xz was still 30MB which is quite a lot to host, and we would then have to identify that the tree had been updated.

So, at the moment I suggest pointing to cgit, with a note that users can use git (link to BLFS) to clone that if they find it easier.

[bdubbs@…]

I've been thinking about this a little. We can clone the git repo on anduin under an apache reachable location and then point users to that location for individual packages.

We then do a daily 'git pull' to keep it updated. The book can then reference that.

• ​http://anduin.linuxfromscratch.org/sources/linux-firmware/

We could also create a daily tarball, but I'm not sure how useful that would be.

[bdubbs@…]

A new page was added to BLFS about firmware that addresses this ticket. Most of that content was from Ken (thanks).

Also added a note in Chapter 8 about not deleting the kernel source due to the possibility of the need for future configuration changes.

Marking as fixed.