Re: Rework of request firmware

[Jon Smirl <jonsmirl@gmail.com>]

On Sun, 20 Mar 2005 14:37:16 +0100, Kay Sievers <kay.sievers@vrfy.org> wrote:
> What is the concept of a "post"? Does it receive data for the kernel to
> use? What is the overlap with firmware loading here? You just need to
> run a program from userspace, right?

Post is the commonly used term for what you do to hardware when it is
first turned on to get it running. For example the system BIOS posts
all the devices in the system.

The system BIOS does not post secondary video cards. For these cards
when the driver is first loaded I have to run a program that takes the
video BIOS ROM on the card and runs it in vm86/emu86. The ROM contents
are already exposed in sysfs. If I don't do this the hardware will not
respond. The system BIOS does this for you in real mode on the primary
card during the boot process. Another time the video BIOS needs to be
run is when graphics cards are being resumed. The posting program
needs to run in user space and be triggered from the probe function.

I initially started to add support for post as a standalone service
but received complaints on lkml that the code needed was almost
identical to request_firmware(). BenH has also pointed out that the
synchronous request_firmware() will deadlock in many cases during the
resume process. Video card posting is targeted for early user space
when complete.

-- 
Jon Smirl
jonsmirl@gmail.com


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