Ubuntu/Debian firmware-tools status

[Matt Domsch]

On Mon, Nov 12, 2007 at 01:51:59PM +0100, Robert Lindgren wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I was just wondering if there is any work going on with providing
> newer version of the firmware-tools for Ubuntu/Debian. I'm aware that
> Dell doesn't support this OS, but right now it's kinda problematic to
> upgrade a remote Dell server running these OSes.
> 
> Is it possible to convert the current versions of the rpms with alien
> and have a successful flash of lets say the latest urgent perc4
> firmware for 2850?

A few weeks ago I spent time making proper Debian/Ubuntu packages.
That code is in the git repositories at http://linux.dell.com/git/ for
firmware-tools and firmware-addon-dell.  "make deb" and "make sdeb"
(for uploading to REVU) are added and functional.

Michael has been working on a deb autobuilder, similar in concept to
our RPM autobuilder, so we can produce packages easily.  We've also
talked about how we would populate a deb ftparchive on linux.dell.com.

A few gotchas still exist.
1) there's no easy way to deal with multiple target distro versions
   without editing debian/changelog for each build.  That's somewhat
   annoying.  OK, more than somewhat.  So this isn't automated.

2) corollary to 1), where do we put all those firmware packages that
   will work for all the debian versions?  They're really simple
   packages, but it makes no sense to replicate them for each distro
   version. (and no, I don't really want to get into full pool
   management if I can avoid it).  This may wind up being as simple as
   creating a fake version named 'crossdistro' or something,

3) apt-get install $(bootstrap_firmware) doesn't work.  It's really
   not happy with the linefeeds in that output.  This is solvable ala
   the bootstrap_firmware -u flag used by up2date, which reformats the
   output to be friendly for up2date.  Similar work needs to happen
   for apt.

4) we don't need it quite yet, but in yum we have the dellsysid yum
   plugin which is handy for having per-system per-os-version
   repositories.  Apt has the idea of replacable fields (e.g. $ARCH)
   but that's about it.  We'd want this extended in the long term.


 
> Does anybody know if it's possible to flash from virtual media, like
> drac4,drac5?
> 
> Is there anything I can do to help out with the firmwaretools for
> debian? testing or something...

Grab the code from the git repos, build debs, and give those a try.
Some of the steps may still be manual, but they're improving.  And
then send patches back to this list. :-)

Thanks,
Matt

-- 
Matt Domsch
Linux Technology Strategist, Dell Office of the CTO
linux.dell.com & www.dell.com/linux