Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 177452
Support installs via wireless adapters that require firmware
Last modified: 2014-03-16 22:57:31 EDT
Obviously, this is messy. There are various steps that would need done. 1) Add a firmware loader that gets the events and handles them to the loader 1a) just use udev w/o using it to load modules? 2) Get the firmware somewhere where you can find it Since we don't ship the firmware, this is tricky, since it can't be on the basic boot images. Options: a) respin the boot image b) make a special DD with it b.2) make it initramfs, cat it onto the boot initrd.img? c) make an updates.img with it? d) something else? Possibly this would need to piggyback on any mkinitrd firmware work.
Putting on a list for FC6 so we don't forget about it
Hasn't happened for FC6, although the infrastructure bits are kind of there. The big problem is questions around UI and how to handle loading it. Which are largely unresolved due to the fact that the kernel doesn't export bits that tell us what firmware files go with what modules.
requested by Jams Antill
Closing as rawhide now since we are copying the firmware in to the initrd now.
Reopening - doing an install on a laptop with Intel 2100 wireless card and the ipw2100 module is not loaded.
Changing version to '9' as part of upcoming Fedora 9 GA. More information and reason for this action is here: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/HouseKeeping
We were explicitly blacklisting wireless modules from appearing in the images for a while for some reason that no one can really remember. I have added the wireless modules back into the images so we can give them another test. Remember to use the "allowwireless" command line option. David - what's the status of wireless now with your NetworkManager loader rewrite?
As of now, there is no capability to configure a wireless interface in the installer. We have all of the necessary backend components (NM, wpa_supplicant, and wireless firmware), but the frontend components (UI in loader and in anaconda) are not there yet. Until that point, we won't be able to do wireless installs.
Just and FYI - on a system that uses a b43 driver (BCM4318) I'm getting prompted for what interface I want to load my kickstart file over. This probably should get blacklisted since the b43 firmware is not present.
We're being pretty smart about copying over firmware images these days. Looks like the b43 module needs to be changed so modinfo returns something useful to us. Right now it's just saying FW13 which isn't really helpful. Sounds like a new bug to me.