Re: AIC94xx SAS question.

[James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@HansenPartnership.com>]

On Sat, 2008-04-26 at 10:56 -0400, Wakko Warner wrote:
> Keith Hopkins wrote:
> > On 04/22/2008 07:19 AM, Wakko Warner wrote:
> > >Can either of these be done:
> > >1) Embed the firmware into the driver so that it can be used before the
> > >rootfs id mounted.
> > 
> > I think this is generally not done because firmware tends to be 
> > closed-source.
> 
> I can understand this from the point of the distrobution of the linux
> kernel, but it still can be done.  If there were a patch or something that
> would convert the file, that's all I care.  This for me would be preferred.

There is certainly a way to do this: all you really need to do is to
render the firmware into hex as a character array, compile the array
with the driver and return a pointer to the first byte at the
request_firmware call.

The practical reason it's no-longer done (apart from the annoyance it
causes debian) is simply that the file is huge and the firmware seems to
change quite a lot.  For the qla2xxx driver (whose firmware, admittedly
is larger than aic94xx) it used to result in a 4MB patch every time
there was a tiny change to the file.

> > >2) Can the firmware be loaded in an initr{d,amfs}?
> > 
> > Sure.  openSuSE does it in their mkinitrd.
> 
> I'm not sure if you got the point of #2 or not.  I do *NOT* want the driver
> as a module, I want it compiled into the kernel and then load the firmware
> from an initramfs.
> 
> I think I figured out how to do #2, but if/when I do it is another story.  I
> believe that the driver won't bind to the card if the firmware isn't
> available, thus I can have it bind to the card at a later time (during
> initramfs).  I tried this on my system last night (since it crashed anyway). 
> I loaded the module and /sys wasn't mounted.  I mounted /sys and told the
> driver to bind my card and it worked.

James