Re: [PATCH] r8169: keep firmware in memory.

[Ben Hutchings <benh@debian.org>]

On Fri, Jan 14, 2011 at 08:05:22AM -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> [ background for new people in discussion: once more, a driver resume
> didn't get a working firmware load. ]
> 
> On Thu, Jan 13, 2011 at 10:52 PM, Michael Tokarev <mjt@tls.msk.ru> wrote:
> >
> > Given all this I think this is somewhat clumsy still.  How
> > does other NIC drivers handles this situation - e.g. tg3?
> > Maybe this needs to be a generic solution instead of per-driver?
> 
> We've had this bug several times - and not just for network drivers
> either.
[...]
> Maybe the firmware loader could be made more useful to automatically
> handle the caching (it already knows about built-in firmware) for the
> case where CONFIG_PM is enabled. So that drivers _could_ just
> basically do "request_firmware()" in their resume functions, and it
> would get satisfied from RAM for the re-request case.
[...]
 
This is something I started to implement, but never got finished.  I
don't think it can be done without an API change, though, as we need
to know when to drop firmware from the cache.  But perhaps this could
be done with a hook in the device-driver binding code.

Ben.

-- 
Ben Hutchings
We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking.
                                                              - Albert Camus