Re: absolute firmware paths

[Sebastian Kuzminsky <seb@highlab.com>]

On Mon June 30 2008 23:20:50 Marcel Holtmann wrote:
> > Anyway, the drivers and the firmware are distributed together.  A common
> > use case for many of our developers and some of our users is to check
> > out the source code, maybe hack on it some, build it, and run it out of
> > the sandbox (without installing).  The problem is that udev can't find
> > the firmwares in peoples home directories.
> >
> > My proposal is to have the driver accept a modparam giving the absolute
> > path to the firmware file the user wants, and have the firmware.sh
> > helper read it from there, bypassing the normal firmware search path.
>
> use symlinks like everybody else.

That's an option, true.  However, it gets really inconvenient when you
have, for example, a stable version installed from the official package
and an experimental version in a sandbox in your home.

Developing kernel drivers is super convenient in Linux because you can
give insmod absolute paths to load a specific file out of your development
directory, or you can let modprobe auto-fetch the installed driver module
from the standard path.

It'd be great if the kernel's budding firmware support had a similar
flexibility, for firmware developers and others.  Allowing absolute
paths in request_firmware()/firmware.sh seems like a nice clean way to
provide this.

Is there a technical reason this is a bad idea, or is it a subjective
"bad smell" type of thing?  Because I dont smell it.


Alternatively, I suppose I could request a relative path beginning with
"../..", then followed by the absolute path I want.  Now *that* smells ;-)


-- 
Sebastian Kuzminsky
                you are the only light there is for yourself my friend
                                                     -- Gogol Bordello