Originally discovered as part of https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T306148, but opening a separate task:

We have some servers with 10G Broadcom cards which emit the following message:

Some of your hardware needs non-free firmware files to operate. The firmware can be loaded from removable media, such as a USB stick or floppy.
The missing firmware files are: bnx2x/bnx2x-e2-7.13.21.0.fw bnx2x/bnx2x-e2-7.13.21.0.fw

The error message is a bit of a red herring: the tg3 driver tries to load firmware if available, but works fine without (the firmware is only needed for some additional features).

The Debian installer in bullseye introduced some changes to better deal with the fallout of missing firmware: On some GPUs people were only seeing a black screen since the firmware in question was even required to present the info screen. To mitigate that there's now code which actively detects such cases and prompts a warning. This was added in hw-detect https://tracker.debian.org/news/1245038/accepted-hw-detect-1145-source-into-unstable/ (hw-detect is a d-i component)

The case of the tg3 firmware is even mentioned there explicitly: https://www.debian.org/releases/bullseye/amd64/ch02s02 So it might be a case where the modalias information tells hw-detect that the NIC requires the firmware, while in fact is doesn't.

For bookworm this will be fixed for good by finally including the firmware in the default installation media: https://blog.einval.com/2022/04/19

I made a patch which intended to disable the firmware prompt: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/784259 But sadly it doesn't appear to be working