Compress linux-firmware packages
Currently, installing all linux-firmware packages results in a /lib/firmware
directory which is around 1,0 GB in size. This could be significantly smaller if we started compressing firmware during packaging. The Linux kernel has supported loading compressed firmware since version 5.3 and other distributions such as Fedora and Arch Linux have already implemented this successfully. In Fedora, for example, at the time of writing the entire /lib/firmware
directory is a more modest 238 MB.
There are some problems however. Not all firmware can be compressed, so exceptions would have to be made on a per-file basis. In particular, firmware served to certain remote processors on Qualcomm devices cannot be compressed at the moment as the serving happens in userspace rather than kernelspace. There may also be other necessary exceptions, so this would require extensive testing to avoid breakage. As other distributions already have implemented this, we could investigate what files (if any) they exempt as a start. However, their lists may not be complete as it is unlikely that they've tested more obscure ARM hardware.