RFC: changes to microcode update driver.

Tigran Aivazian
2003-10-07T10:58:04Z

Hi guys,

It's been a long time that I was going to send to Linux the patch with the
following changes, but the birth of my first child intervened and caused
delays (though can't call them "unexpected" :). Now, if I hear from people
"no, no! we are using this feature!" then I will reconsider:

1. Remove ->read() method for /dev/cpu/microcode device node and do not
hold a copy of applied microcode chunks in kernel memory. In the days when
we had a regular devfs file with a non-zero size this had at least some
potential use but now this feature is almost useless and removing it would
allow a lot of code cleanup and simplification.

2. remove MICROCODE_IOCFREE ioctl for freeing the copy of held microcode
(because there won't be such copy, see 1.)

Please let me know your thoughts.

Kind regards
Tigran