Hi all,

Despite the recent thread on usrmerge and Lorenzo's attempt at warning
runit/runit-init users, this still caught me off-guard, so I thought I
post here.

The firmware-nonfree source package, as of version 20230625-1, installs
its firmware files below /usr/lib/firmware. Unfortunately, the kernel
(at least until 6.5.0-5) only looks in /lib/firmware. During my weekly
upgrade I didn't think things through and happily rebooted to run the
latest, greatest kernel. That didn't go too well because all of a
sudden a pile of firmware could not be loaded and I ended up without
support for

- networking (firmware-realtek)
- bluetooth (firmware-misc-nonfree)
- graphics (firmware-amd-graphics)

on the box I upgraded.
Obviously, the fall out depends on the hardware you use.

I manually downloaded the usrmerge package and its dependencies (another
four perl libraries in my case, YMMV) on another box, copied them onto a
USB stick to transfer them via sneaker net and moved them below
/var/cache/apt/archives on the borked box.

Installed usrmerge and finally rebooted successfully.

I've already installed usrmerge on my other boxes running excalibur to
avoid this disaster scenario.

FTR, you can check for installed binary packages originating from the
firmware-nonfree source package with

dkg-query -W -f '${Source}\t${Package}\n' | grep firmware-nonfree

If you're on excalibur (testing) or ceres (unstable) and have one or
more firmware-nonfree packages installed, make sure to install usrmerge
*before* you reboot. Upgrading the firmware packages or the kernel
before installing usrmerge should be okay.

Hope this helps,
--
Olaf Meeuwissen