In the recent discussion about saving space (in the ELF thread) there poped up linux-firmware topic several time. Let's kick it off as separate thread.

I have several question and I am unable to find the answer for them.

1. How do I find which firmware package I need? On my workstation I have:

$ rpm -qa |grep firmware |wc -l
27

I seriously doubt I need all of them. I definitely do not need them on server, where I never add any new HW. But how do I know which one is in use and which not?

2. How the firmware packages actually work? Do I need them to be present every time? Or when module is loaded? Or something else? (sorry if this too naive question).

3. The linux-firmare has 100MB. And cca 280 MB extracted. Is it about the time to split the package? Here are the biggest space eater of the space:

18M     /usr/lib/firmware/amdgpu
18M     /usr/lib/firmware/qcom
28M     /usr/lib/firmware/intel
31M     /usr/lib/firmware/mrvl
47M     /usr/lib/firmware/mellanox

Miroslav