Re: Kernel Firmware Loading

["Alexander E. Patrakov" <patrakov@ums.usu.ru>]

Duncan Sands wrote:

>On Friday 4 November 2005 15:46, Alexander E. Patrakov wrote:
>  
>
>>Duncan Sands wrote:
>>
>>    
>>
>>>>... I don't see why the kernel can't wait until userspace has been mounted before it tries to load the firmware.
>>>>   
>>>>
>>>>        
>>>>
>>>Me neither.  I mean, why do coldplugging of all devices (rather than just an
>>>essential few) before the root filesystem is mounted?
>>> 
>>>
>>>      
>>>
>>Please propose how are you going to tell the kernel the list of 
>>"essential" devices.
>>    
>>
>
>Hopefully the list of essential devices needing coldplugging is empty.  I had in mind:
>just what's needed to mount the root filesystem.  What's the problem with that?
>  
>
E.g., you want to specify that only /dev/sda is needed because you have 
your root filesystem on your SCSI disk. But your SCSI controller is a 
PCI device. So we need to walk over all PCI devices and bind drivers to 
them. One of them will register itself as a SCSI controller driver. But 
all PCI devices before that one will also be initialized then, and may 
(or may not) want firmware or other initialization!

And now suppose that after hardware upgrade your PCI cards were 
shuffled, how would you handle that?

-- 
Alexander E. Patrakov


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