Consider continued support of kernels <5.4

And what files that you use. Say that you use the same files you have Riped from the cd in the Early 2000’s… It’s going to sound crap.

I am using music streams from the internet (like www.surfmusik.de) or
FLAC 24 Bit 192 kHz.

I don´t know the cause of sound difference of the kernels.

Can I use the kernels from www.kernel.org in Manjaro ?

The Manjaro kernels are built from the kernel.org sources.

They just have addition patches on top.

See PKGBUILD of linux516 as an example.

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They’d be unable to load the compressed firmwares just the same and therefore not work either.


edit:

If you’re feeling up to experiment (on a spare machine/vm), you could try uncompressing all firmware files in /usr/lib/firmware after linux-firmware package updates and then booting up older kernels from www.kernel.org should work just fine.

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Step 3 is the config from the running kernel (I think), so boot up 4.19 and save the config file.

What contains the xz compresses firmware image ?

I have experience with configuring and compiling kernels - Gentoo user time for 2 years.

You could try building the linux-firmware-uncompressed

I am however in doubt of how the kernel interact with the firmware files - meaning - does firmware files - or could they - expose an ABI which potentially breaks a kernel below a certain version?

This is the chicken egg problem.

firmware is normally optional so might not even been needed on your system

There is no ABI between a firmware blobs itself and the kernel. The kernel (module) just takes the firmware file and uploads it into the devices RAM when the system is booted. For example iwlwifi picks up the firmware blob for you wifi adapter and loads it into it’s memory. The firmware is being run by the devices microchip, so the kernel does not care what it contains at all.

Otherwise you’d need different firmware packages for the different kernel versions…

The problem is that the firmware-loader component in the kernel (that thing that takes those blobs and uploads it to the device) only supports compressed firmware files since version 5.3.

It should be perfectly fine to use uncompressed firmware files with kernel < 5.3.
So yeah, the AUR package should do the trick indeed.

Well, there is no problem. Arch doesn’t have any 4.x kernels anymore, so they can decide to compress and split their firmware. If we want to continue as is, our firmware packages can only been split to reduce size. 5.x kernels can support both variants and 4.x only uncompressed firmware files.

We can simply ignore the Fedora changes and continue as is: upgpkg: linux-firmware 20220119.0c6a7b3-1: update to lastest git comm… · archlinux/svntogit-packages@4bf18f5 · GitHub

“Problem” was probably the wrong wording.

I just wanted to make the point that as long as you deliver the firmware uncompressed, the older kernels will support it as well :wink:

I added a poll to Twitter. Let’s see …

How can vote a person without twitter account ?
Add a pool on the Manjaro forum ?

In the end it won’t matter what polls would say. Our kernel team has to decide if they want to continue or not. But here is a poll:

Should Manjaro continue to drop 4.x kernels and use compressed firmware files?

  • No, as I still use 4.x
  • Continue, all good

0 voters

I only need the kernel 4.19 - all other 4.x kernels can be dropped.

@Keruskerfuerst 4.x kernels got re-added with today’s testing update. This includes 4.19:

  • We readded 4.x kernels. Note that 4.4 series is now marked EOL
  • linux-firmware we kept split-up, however we ship them uncompressed to support 4.x kernels still

Thanks at all for that!

All other 4.x kernels can be removed: 4.4.x, 4.9.x and 4.14.x.

:slightly_smiling_face:

P.S.: kernels 4.4.x, 4.9.x and 4.14.x do sound a bit slow.

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