Re: [bug?] tg3: Failed to load firmware "tigon/tg3_tso.bin"

David Woodhouse
2008-07-05T08:50:03Z

On Sat, 2008-07-05 at 09:41 +0200, Takashi Iwai wrote:
> At Sat, 5 Jul 2008 01:13:22 +0200,
> Olivier Galibert wrote:
> >
> > On Fri, Jul 04, 2008 at 03:42:37PM +0100, David Woodhouse wrote:
> > > It doesn't yet; that patch is in linux-next. The firmware is shipped as
> > > part of the kernel source tree, and you currently need to run 'make
> > > firmware_install' to put it in /lib/firmware, although we're looking at
> > > making that easier because apparently having to run 'make
> > > firmware_install' is too hard...
> >
> > Won't that break multiple kernel installs on any binary packaging
> > system that cares about file collisions? Multiple kernel rpms
> > providing the same /lib/firmware files would break things wouldn't
> > they ?
>
> Yes, it will, if the firmware blobs are packed into the kernel
> package. In a long term, we can put firmware files into a separate,
> architecture independent noarch package, though. This will save the
> total package size, too.

I'm not familiar with the SuSE kernel specfile, but it was a fairly
minor change to the Fedora kernel to do exactly that 'long term' thing.
The patch is in the fedora-kernel-list archives.

We have to do the same thing with exported headers, anyway -- those are
built from the kernel too, but again we need to have only one copy
installed or we'd get conflicts.

> But, right now, it's difficult because the installation and build of
> firmware files depend on the kernel config. We'd need a make rule for
> installing the all firmware files for that purpose.

That's what 'make firmware_install' does. It's config- and arch-
independent, mostly because it was developed with distributors in mind.

--
dwmw2