Subject: Re: bug#58357: [Patch staging ] doc add a recommended system in 'Hardware Considerations'

From: Ludovic Courtès <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 14 Oct 2022 17:12:59 +0200

Hi!

This discussion and others we had at the Ten Years of Guix event makes
me think we should strive to avoid bad surprises by being more
explicit.  Concretely, we could:

  • Under “Hardware Considerations”, list common devices known not to
    work without non-free {firm,soft}ware, such as Intel Wifi (iwlwifi).
    We cannot be exhaustive but we should at least mention common
    problems with recent x86_64 laptops.

  • Under “Hardware Considerations”, make the list of devices known to
    work clearer, in tabular form, perhaps expanding it.

  • In the installer, print a message upfront when unusable devices are
    found—typically Intel wifi.

    I’m not sure how to do this though.  Maintaining a list of known-bad
    devices doesn’t sound great, but it’s better than nothing.
    Instrumenting the firmware-loading mechanism would be a good way to
    detect problems, but I think it’s not even getting invoked in
    Linux-libre (or not always).  Alternatively, we could tweak
    deblobbing so that it produces a list of known-bad modules or
    devices.

Thoughts?

Ludo’.