Install linux firmware package

Installation guide

This document is a guide for installing Arch Linux using the live system booted from an installation medium made from an official installation image. The installation medium provides accessibility features which are described on the page Install Arch Linux with accessibility options. For alternative means of installation, see Category:Installation process.

Before installing, it would be advised to view the FAQ. For conventions used in this document, see Help:Reading. In particular, code examples may contain placeholders (formatted in italics ) that must be replaced manually.

For more detailed instructions, see the respective ArchWiki articles or the various programs’ man pages, both linked from this guide. For interactive help, the IRC channel and the forums are also available.

Arch Linux should run on any x86_64-compatible machine with a minimum of 512 MiB RAM, though more memory is needed to boot the live system for installation.[1] A basic installation should take less than 2 GiB of disk space. As the installation process needs to retrieve packages from a remote repository, this guide assumes a working internet connection is available.

Contents

Pre-installation

Acquire an installation image

Visit the Download page and, depending on how you want to boot, acquire the ISO file or a netboot image, and the respective GnuPG signature.

Verify signature

It is recommended to verify the image signature before use, especially when downloading from an HTTP mirror, where downloads are generally prone to be intercepted to serve malicious images.

On a system with GnuPG installed, do this by downloading the PGP signature (under Checksums in the Download page) to the ISO directory, and verifying it with:

Alternatively, from an existing Arch Linux installation run:

Prepare an installation medium

The installation image can be supplied to the target machine via a USB flash drive, an optical disc or a network with PXE: follow the appropriate article to prepare yourself an installation medium from the chosen image.

Boot the live environment

1. Point the current boot device to the one which has the Arch Linux installation medium. Typically it is achieved by pressing a key during the POST phase, as indicated on the splash screen. Refer to your motherboard’s manual for details.
2. When the installation medium’s boot loader menu appears, select Arch Linux install medium and press Enter to enter the installation environment.

To switch to a different console—for example, to view this guide with Lynx alongside the installation—use the Alt+arrow shortcut. To edit configuration files, mcedit(1) , nano and vim are available. See packages.x86_64 for a list of the packages included in the installation medium.

Set the console keyboard layout

The default console keymap is US. Available layouts can be listed with:

To modify the layout, append a corresponding file name to loadkeys(1) , omitting path and file extension. For example, to set a German keyboard layout:

Console fonts are located in /usr/share/kbd/consolefonts/ and can likewise be set with setfont(8) .

Verify the boot mode

To verify the boot mode, list the efivars directory:

If the command shows the directory without error, then the system is booted in UEFI mode. If the directory does not exist, the system may be booted in BIOS (or CSM) mode. If the system did not boot in the mode you desired, refer to your motherboard’s manual.

Connect to the internet

To set up a network connection in the live environment, go through the following steps:

• Ensure your network interface is listed and enabled, for example with ip-link(8) :
• For wireless and WWAN, make sure the card is not blocked with rfkill.
• Connect to the network:
  • Ethernet—plug in the cable.
  • Wi-Fi—authenticate to the wireless network using iwctl.
  • Mobile broadband modem—connect to the mobile network with the mmcli utility.
• Configure your network connection:
  • DHCP: dynamic IP address and DNS server assignment (provided by systemd-networkd and systemd-resolved) should work out of the box for Ethernet, WLAN and WWAN network interfaces.
  • Static IP address: follow Network configuration#Static IP address.
• The connection may be verified with ping:

Update the system clock

Use timedatectl(1) to ensure the system clock is accurate:

To check the service status, use timedatectl status .

Partition the disks

When recognized by the live system, disks are assigned to a block device such as /dev/sda , /dev/nvme0n1 or /dev/mmcblk0 . To identify these devices, use lsblk or fdisk.

Results ending in rom , loop or airoot may be ignored.

The following partitions are required for a chosen device:

If you want to create any stacked block devices for LVM, system encryption or RAID, do it now.

Use fdisk or parted to modify partition tables. For example:

Example layouts

BIOS with MBR

Mount point	Partition	Partition type	Suggested size
[SWAP]	/dev/swap_partition	Linux swap	More than 512 MiB
/mnt	/dev/root_partition	Linux	Remainder of the device

UEFI with GPT

Mount point	Partition	Partition type	Suggested size
/mnt/boot or /mnt/efi 1	/dev/efi_system_partition	EFI system partition	At least 260 MiB
[SWAP]	/dev/swap_partition	Linux swap	More than 512 MiB
/mnt	/dev/root_partition	Linux x86-64 root (/)	Remainder of the device

1. /mnt/efi should only be considered if the used boot loader is capable of loading the kernel and initramfs images from the root volume. See the warning in Arch boot process#Boot loader.

Format the partitions

Once the partitions have been created, each newly created partition must be formatted with an appropriate file system. For example, to create an Ext4 file system on /dev/root_partition , run:

If you created a partition for swap, initialize it with mkswap(8) :

Mount the file systems

Mount the root volume to /mnt . For example, if the root volume is /dev/root_partition :

Create any remaining mount points (such as /mnt/efi ) using mkdir(1) and mount their corresponding volumes.

If you created a swap volume, enable it with swapon(8) :

genfstab(8) will later detect mounted file systems and swap space.

Installation

Select the mirrors

Packages to be installed must be downloaded from mirror servers, which are defined in /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist . On the live system, after connecting to the internet, reflector updates the mirror list by choosing 20 most recently synchronized HTTPS mirrors and sorting them by download rate.[2]

The higher a mirror is placed in the list, the more priority it is given when downloading a package. You may want to inspect the file to see if it is satisfactory. If it is not, edit the file accordingly, and move the geographically closest mirrors to the top of the list, although other criteria should be taken into account.

This file will later be copied to the new system by pacstrap, so it is worth getting right.

Install essential packages

Use the pacstrap(8) script to install the base package, Linux kernel and firmware for common hardware:

The base package does not include all tools from the live installation, so installing other packages may be necessary for a fully functional base system. In particular, consider installing:

• userspace utilities for the management of file systems that will be used on the system,
• utilities for accessing RAID or LVM partitions,
• specific firmware for other devices not included in linux-firmware (e.g. sof-firmware for sound cards),
• software necessary for networking,
• a text editor,
• packages for accessing documentation in man and info pages: man-db , man-pages and texinfo .

To install other packages or package groups, append the names to the pacstrap command above (space separated) or use pacman while chrooted into the new system. For comparison, packages available in the live system can be found in packages.x86_64.

Configure the system

Fstab

Generate an fstab file (use -U or -L to define by UUID or labels, respectively):

Check the resulting /mnt/etc/fstab file, and edit it in case of errors.

Chroot

Change root into the new system:

Time zone

Run hwclock(8) to generate /etc/adjtime :

This command assumes the hardware clock is set to UTC. See System time#Time standard for details.

Localization

Edit /etc/locale.gen and uncomment en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8 and other needed locales. Generate the locales by running:

Network configuration

Add matching entries to hosts(5) :

If the system has a permanent IP address or a fully qualified domain name, see the example in Network configuration#Local hostname resolution.

Complete the network configuration for the newly installed environment, that may include installing suitable network management software.

Initramfs

Creating a new initramfs is usually not required, because mkinitcpio was run on installation of the kernel package with pacstrap.

For LVM, system encryption or RAID, modify mkinitcpio.conf(5) and recreate the initramfs image:

Root password

Boot loader

Choose and install a Linux-capable boot loader. If you have an Intel or AMD CPU, enable microcode updates in addition.

Reboot

Exit the chroot environment by typing exit or pressing Ctrl+d .

Optionally manually unmount all the partitions with umount -R /mnt : this allows noticing any «busy» partitions, and finding the cause with fuser(1) .

Finally, restart the machine by typing reboot : any partitions still mounted will be automatically unmounted by systemd. Remember to remove the installation medium and then login into the new system with the root account.

Post-installation

See General recommendations for system management directions and post-installation tutorials (like creating unprivileged user accounts, setting up a graphical user interface, sound or a touchpad).

For a list of applications that may be of interest, see List of applications.

Источник

Ubuntu Wiki

Firmware

What is Firmware?

Many devices have two essential software pieces that make them function in your operating system. The first is a working driver, which is the software that lets your system talk to the hardware. The second is firmware, which is usually a small piece of code that is uploaded directly to the device for it to function correctly. You can think of the firmware as a way of programming the hardware inside the device. In fact, in almost all cases firmware is treated like hardware in that it’s a black box; there’s no accompanying source code that is freely distributed with it.

Where Do You Get Firmware?

The firmware is usually maintained by the company that develops the hardware device. In Windows land, firmware is usually a part of the driver you install. It’s often not seen by the user. In Linux, firmware may be distributed from a number of sources. Some firmware comes from the Linux kernel sources. Others that have redistribution licenses come from upstream. Some firmware unfortunately do not have licenses allowing free redistribution.

In Ubuntu, firmware comes from one of the following sources:

• The linux-image package (which contains the Linux kernel and licensed firmware)
• The linux-firmware package (which contains other licensed firmware)
• The linux-firmware-nonfree package in multiverse (which contains firmware that are missing redistribution licenses)
• A separate driver package
• Elsewhere (driver CD, email attachment, website)

Note that the linux-firmware-nonfree package is not installed by default.

The firmware files are placed into /lib/firmware. If you look inside there on your Ubuntu installation you will see hundreds of firmware files that have been installed by these packages.

How is Firmware Used?

Each driver for devices that require firmware have some special logic to retrieve firmware from files in /lib/firmware. The basic process is:

1. Driver requests firmware file «ar9170.fw»
2. The kernel sends an event to udev asking for the firmware
3. The udev program runs a script that shoves the data in the firmware file into a special file created by the kernel
4. The kernel reads the firmware data from the special file it created and hands the data to the driver
5. The driver then does what it needs to do to load the firmware into the device

If everything goes well you should see something like the following in your /var/log/syslog:

If there’s an issue, you may see something like the following:

Debugging Firmware Loading

Luckily, the firmware loading process is not too difficult to watch in action. Using the following debugging steps we can pin point what step in the process is failing.

Initial Step

First, ensure that the firmware file is present. If you are missing the firmware file, try searching on the web for a copy of it. If you find it, consider filing a bug against linux-firmware if the firmware has a redistribution license or against linux-firmware-nonfree otherwise.

If the file is present, check that it’s not empty using ‘ls -l’:

The size of the file is the number listed after the user and group owners («root» and «root» in this case). It should be non-zero. At this point, you may want to search the web for an md5sum hash of the file and compare it to this file, but it’s not likely that the file is corrupted. If the firmware is corrupted, you will likely see an error message from the driver stating that the firmware was invalid or failed to upload anyways.

At this point we’ve verified that the firmware file exists, but wasn’t uploaded. We need to figure out which of steps 2-4 mentioned above are failing. Let’s start with step 2.

Kernel Event Sent to Udev

The second step involves the kernel sending an event to the udev subsystem. Luckily, there’s a handy tool we can use for monitoring these event messages: udevadm. Start with your driver unloaded. Then execute:

Now load your driver. Sometimes loading the driver alone will cause a firmware request. Other times, as with the e100 driver, you will need to do something to initiate a firmware request. In the case of the e100 driver, the firmware is requested after the user tries to bring up the ethernet interface by running ‘ip link set eth0 up’.

Once you have initiated a firmware request you should see a udev event that looks like the following:

There are three key pieces of information in this event:

• ACTION=add: This means the event is for the addition of the devices, as opposed to the removal of the device
• SUBSYSTEM=firmware: This means the event is a firmware request event

FIRMWARE= : This is the filename of the firmware requested by the driver.

If you do not see an event with these three items, then the kernel request is not being propagated to udev. You should file a bug at this point against the udev package. If you do see this event, continue to the next step.

Udev Sends Firmware to Kernel

Now that udev has seen the firmware request, it has to decide how to process it. There should be a «rules» file in /lib/udev/rules.d/50-firmware.rules with a single udev rule:

9.10 (Karmic Koala) and earlier:

10.04 (Lucid Lynx) and later:

This rule tells udev to run the firmware program, which may be found in /lib/udev/, whenever it sees an event with both ACTION=add and SUBSYSTEM=firmware. In 9.10 and earlier, the firmware program will be passed the rest of the udev event information as environment variables. In 10.04 and later, the firmware filename and device path will be passed as parameters.

We can watch udev process the event by turning on extra logging:

When you initiate a firmware request, udev will log what it does with the event to /var/log/syslog. For example, you should see something like:

If you do not see firmware.sh get run, then you likely have an issue with your udev rules. Check for any custome udev rules you have in /etc/udev/rules.d. Any files in this directory will override files with the same name under /lib/udev/rules.d. Rules in /etc/udev/rules.d may also prevent the firmware rule from executing properly. If you have any issues at this step you should seek help from the community. If you believe you have found an issue in udev, feel free to open a bug.

After you have debugged udev execution, you should return the logging output to the normal level:

Kernel Reads the Firmware

If the firmware.sh script has been executed by udev, any errors it encounters should show up in your /var/log/syslog file. If you see any errors here they may be caused by the firmware.sh script (which is part of udev), or by the kernel. If you see the following error:

you should open a kernel bug. If you see any other error, you should open a bug against udev.

Kernel Gives Firmware to Driver

If the firmware loading process properly runs firmware.sh without an error, but the driver complains about the firmware, one of two things may be wrong. First, the firmware file may be incorrect or corrupted. You can try to reinstall the firmware or get the firmware from another source. Second, there may be an issue with the driver itself. If you have tried all the firmware versions you could find, you should open a kernel bug.

Kernel/Firmware (последним исправлял пользователь khadgaray 2013-12-11 08:01:04)

Источник