Prompting for proprietary drivers on Anaconda(without shipping them on ISO)

Ask Fedora
,
1

I want to mostly ask if this is possible to do from a legal perspective.

I have seen many distributions ship specific nvidia ISOs, and while that is a solution that works from most people, it is not intuitive.

I kind of wonder if it would be possible to have a drivers menu on the anaconda installer that checks your hardware and and asks you if you want to install the nvidia driver. Complete with a EULA from nvidia you need to read and everything. By doing so the third party repository from RPMfusion is enabled and the nvidia driver applicable to your system is downloaded, stored, and used during the installation.

This means that the fedora ISO:

  • never ships the proprietary driver
  • prompts the user and makes them read the EULA
  • makes it easier for less advanced users to use

The other option i could think of is shipping an “additional drivers” utility similar to the ubuntu one(also a very good tool)

2

I imagine Red Hat legal has gone over this issue and decided it is safer to not offer that themselves.

The system you are proposing is a bit like torrents, a site hosts a reference to a file but not the file itself. Different jurisdictions deal with that issue differently.

It would be good, but the current ‘go to RPM Fusion and follow the instructions’ is not too bad.

3

This seems quite simple to me. It removes fedora from the legal issue of distribution while leaving it entirely up to the user for choice and the process is painless.

The newer open source version of the nvidia driver is also available for modern GPUs and the instructions at rpmfusion also detail how to install that. It seems possible that fedora may see fit to provide that driver in the future (or maybe not.)

1 Like
4

The issue is that nvidia is not contributing that code to the kernel.
And Fedora only ships kernels with upstreamed code.

Redhat is writing a replacement for nouveau called NOVA that will be in the kernel. Nova I expect to “solve” the nvidia issues on newer GPU.
I do not know the time scales for a production ready version of Nova.
I would not expect less than a year, more likely two years, but I wildly guessing.