From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Sebastian Kuzminsky Date: Fri, 04 Jul 2008 03:04:55 +0000 Subject: Re: absolute firmware paths Message-Id: <200807032104.55179.seb@highlab.com> List-Id: References: <200806302204.05544.seb@highlab.com> In-Reply-To: <200806302204.05544.seb@highlab.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: linux-hotplug@vger.kernel.org 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