Re: [GIT *] Allow request_firmware() to be satisfied from in-kernel, use it in more drivers.

David Woodhouse
2008-07-15T19:08:30Z

On Tue, 2008-07-15 at 14:55 -0400, Jeff Garzik wrote:
> Linus Torvalds wrote:
> >
> > On Tue, 15 Jul 2008, Jeff Garzik wrote:
> >
> >> Henrique de Moraes Holschuh wrote:
> >>> On Tue, 15 Jul 2008, Frans Pop wrote:
> >>>> If I were able to compile firmware into the modules, the problem would be
> >>>> solved in one go.
> >>> And this thread would have been shorter, even. I hope someone decides to
> >>> write that support instead of complaining ;-)
> >> I've volunteered -- but if Linus and David will reject my code out of hand,
> >> there is not much point in writing it.
> >
> > Quite frankly, I don't think it's something to reject out of hand, but it
> > does sound pretty damn stupid.
> >
> > Why compile them into the module, when that's just the _inflexible_ model?
>
> Because it works today.
>
> Because that is what people and their scripts expect, today.
>
> Because people should not be forced to fix all their firmware-related
> breakage immediately, just to boot 2.6.27.

On one hand, they don't -- the drivers I've updated in 2.6.27 aren't the
ones they need to boot. I deliberately left drivers/net and drivers/scsi
till later. I don't _expect_ any problems, but there's no rush -- we can
iron out any kinks with the drivers I've done already, then merge the
remaining updates into 2.6.28.

One the other hand, they _do_ need to fix such breakage immediately, if
they have it -- because what I'm doing here is nothing new. Most modern
drivers use request_firmware() already.

So if your userspace has this hypothetical "firmware-related breakage"
of which you speak, then it already won't boot on machines with qla2xxx,
which was converted to use request_firmware() in 2005. To pick but one
example out of many.

--
dwmw2