Upcoming change: Wifi firmware removal

[travier]

As part of coreos/fedora-coreos-tracker#1575, we are planning to remove the remaining wireless card firmwares from the Fedora CoreOS image.

To make sure to keep all those firmware in the ucore images, you will likely want to pre-emptively list them here.

You might also want to include NetworkManager-wifi for full wifi support.

And update the doc: https://github.com/ublue-os/ucore#ucore-1

For the full list, see: coreos/fedora-coreos-config#2938

See also: coreos/fedora-coreos-tracker#862

[travier]

You might also want to add iwd (https://iwd.wiki.kernel.org/, https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/iwd) which is more stable than wpa_supplicant in my experience.

[bsherman]

@travier thank you for the issue and the PRs! I appreciate the support from you and the CoreOS team!

I saw you updated #139 so let me know when you think that list is stable and I can proceed with merging.

It seems the outcome of this will be a responsibility for ucore to track changes of the wifi firmware names in Fedora, but that seems reasonable.

Regarding NetworkManager-wifi and iwd ... I have not used on iwd on Fedora yet, but thanks for the tip. I'll do some testing with that, but we may as well add it with NetworkManager-wifi when the time comes.

[bsherman]

Small update on iwd testing... I've been using on my custom Silverblue images the past couple days and while it has been positive, I wasn't having issues before either, so I'm not sure what to think.

One thing I did notice, I had to forget/rejoin NetworkManager saved wifi networks. I first tried modifying the the foo.connection files to remove the specified wifi device since that changed from predictable naming (eg, wlp8s0) to wlan0, of course restarting NetworkManager after doing so. But this wasn't enough, the network would not join. I still had to forget/join the network again. I think this is likely due to iwd storing credentials in /var/lib/iwd even when used as a backend for NetworkManager-wifi.

TL;DR
If iwd is truly better, I wish Fedora upstream would default to it.
As is, I'd be hesitant to change to it for ublue desktops given users would probably have a frustrating transition without very clearly setting expectations.
If we want to use iwd by default in ucore we should probably do so from day one, to avoid the frustrating transition problem in ucore.

[travier]

I saw you updated #139 so let me know when you think that list is stable and I can proceed with merging.

This list should be accurate right now.

It seems the outcome of this will be a responsibility for ucore to track changes of the wifi firmware names in Fedora, but that seems reasonable.

Yes, this is an unfortunate consequence of the firmware package split. Hopefully this does not happen too often.

TL;DR If iwd is truly better, I wish Fedora upstream would default to it. As is, I'd be hesitant to change to it for ublue desktops given users would probably have a frustrating transition without very clearly setting expectations. If we want to use iwd by default in ucore we should probably do so from day one, to avoid the frustrating transition problem in ucore.

Agree that doing the work upstream is better.