Re: Persistent module storage [was Linux 2.4 Status / TODO page]

Jeff Garzik
2000-11-06T18:38:59Z

Oliver Xymoron wrote:
>
> On Mon, 6 Nov 2000, David Woodhouse wrote:
>
> > The point here is that although I've put up with just keeping the sound
> > driver loaded for the last few years, permanently taking up a large amount
> > of DMA memory, the inter_module_xxx stuff that Keith is proposing would
> > give us a simple way of storing the data which we want to store.
> ...
> > Being able to do it completely in userspace would be neater, though.
>
> I think there are a bunch of other devices that need stuff from userspace
> before they fully init, namely the ones that load proprietary firmware
> images. Will an approach like that work here?

Some devices have a firmware.h that is compiled into the driver. A few
sound devices use a function that loads a firmware file from userspace,
given a filename. The comment in drivers/sound/sound_firmware.c says
that this is a poor method, and that the recommended method for
uploading firmware to a device is via ioctl.

Jeff

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