Re: [PATCH] firmware: Allow release-specific firmware dir

Andrew Morton
2008-09-10T23:24:28Z

On Wed, 10 Sep 2008 16:15:11 -0700
David Woodhouse <dwmw2@infradead.org> wrote:

> On Wed, 2008-09-10 at 16:05 -0700, David Miller wrote:
> >
> > Tell that to every Debian and Debian derived system on the planet.
> >
> > To my knowledge, it is only fedora and possibly one or two other dists
> > that put the firmware files in a unary /lib/firmware location, rather
> > than a versioned /lib/firmware/$KERNELRELASE one.
>
> So every time they upgrade from one kernel to the next, do they
> automatically run b43-fwcutter again to make a new copy of the firmware,
> for the new kernel?
>
> Or if they use QLogic SCSI cards, do they download a new (but identical)
> version of the firmware each time they upgrade their kernel?
>
> It sounds like a daft arrangement to me -- although of course it's
> possible for the packager to do whatever they like, by overriding
> $(INSTALL_FW_PATH) in their package build.
>
> It's definitely not something we should be doing upstream though.
>

It all seems a bit academic. Breaking pre-v127 udev is a showstopper.

A suitable approach might be to copy the files to both /lib/firmware
and to /lib/firmware/$KERNELRELEASE, and to stop copying the files to
/lib/firmware in, oh, 2018 or so..