Re: [PATCH 00/18] firmware: moving drivers to request_firmware()

[Jeff Garzik <jeff@garzik.org>]

David Woodhouse wrote:
> On Thu, 2008-06-05 at 15:16 -0400, Jeff Garzik wrote:
>> Why do we need the .ihex format?
>>
>> We should be loading firmwares exactly as they come from the vendor, 
>> without any wrappers.
> 
> It's just 'objcopy -Ibinary -Oihex foo foo.ihex'. It's purely for
> convenience of handling the binary blobs in git (and it means we can
> append licensing information after the EOF record too, if we want).

Well, I should ask, is this purely an internal build detail?

The developer (and user) should never ever see a .ihex file, outside of 
an active kernel compile.  Wrapping the original firmware makes it more 
difficult to verify, compare and/or change.  In-tree, we should see the 
vendor firmware blobs as shipped, with no wrapping or modification or 
anything.

Any metadata can be added as a separate file.

If .ihex is purely a temporary thing during compile, no big deal, ignore 
me.  Otherwise, that's something we should avoid.

	Jeff