Re: [PATCH 00/04] Load keyspan firmware with hotplug

[Sven Luther <sven.luther@wanadoo.fr>]

On Tue, Apr 05, 2005 at 12:23:29AM -0400, Jan Harkes wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 04, 2005 at 12:17:46PM -0700, Greg KH wrote:
> > On Mon, Apr 04, 2005 at 08:27:53PM +0200, Sven Luther wrote:
> > > Mmm, probably that 2001 discussion about the keyspan firmware, right ?
> > > 
> > >   http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2001/04/msg00145.html
> > > 
> > > Can you summarize the conclusion of the thread, or what you did get from it,
> > > please ? 
> > 
> > That people didn't like the inclusion of firmware, I posted how you can
> > fix it by moving it outside of the kernel, and asked for patches.
> > 
> > None have come.
> 
> Didn't know you were waiting for it. How about something like the
> following series of patches?
> 
> [01/04] - add simple Intel IHEX format parser to the firmware loader.
> [02/04] - make the keyspan driver use request_firmware.
> [03/04] - converter program used to dump the keyspan headers as IHex files.
> [04/04] - result of running the previous program.
> 
> This ofcourse doesn't actually solve Debian's distribution issues since
> the keyspan firmware can only be distributed as part of 'Linux or other
> Open Source operating system kernel'.

Well, if this is the case, it can be distributed on the non-free archive.

> > So I refuse to listen to talk about this, as obviously, no one cares
> > enough about this to actually fix the issue.
> 
> I got tired of always building my own kernels on Debian just to get my
> serial dongle to work since their included keyspan.ko driver is so
> useless that it isn't even worth having. The only way to use it with a
> Debian kernel is to have the dongle in a powered hub and first boot into
> Windows or a normal kernel.org kernel to get the thing initialized.

The non-free driver package should solve that for you.

> Didn't send the patch earlier since I wanted to split off the
> pre-numeration part of the driver so that after intialization we can
> unload the unused parts of the driver as well as the the firmware class
> module.

Friendly,

Sven Luther