Hi all,

The growing size of the firmware for Nvidia and AMD GPUs has been
causing some problems for users with plymouth and that firmware
installed, since that increases the size of every initramfs image and
can lead to a full /boot partition. (On a test VM running unstable,
the size increases from 53 MiB with neither firmware package installed,
to 66 MiB with firmware-amd-graphics or 93 MiB with firmware-nvidia-
graphics.)

We currently don't do a good job of managing the space in /boot. apt autoremoves older kernels but this policy is solely based on numbers of kernels, not taking into account the size of the kernel or initramfs
images. I would like to move to a state where kernel and initramfs
images aren't directly installed to /boot and we have a separate
program to manage that space. But it is too late in the trixie release
cycle to carry out such a transition.

So, as a partial mitigation, I wonder whether it would be possible for
plymouth to stop installing these graphics drivers on amd64?

- On PCs booting with EFI, the built-in efifb driver should work and
is normally configured to match the monitor's native resolution. But
currently plymouth seems to refuse to use it. Is this a intentional
policy or a bug?

- On PCs booting through BIOS, vesafb may work, depending on the
GRUB configuration. Setting GRUB_GFXPAYLOAD_LINUX=auto in
/etc/default/grub seems to make it work, although not at native
resolution. So this might not be a good experience, and it is
dependent on the boot loader.

If we could at least get amd64 EFI systems running plymouth on efifb
instead of amdgpu or nouveau that would probably address a large
majority of the systems with this issue.

Ben.

--
Ben Hutchings
Man invented language to satisfy his deep need to complain.
- Lily Tomlin


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--- SoupGate-Wi