Re: [Ksummit-2008-discuss] RFC: Moving firmware blobs out of the kernel.

[Yinghai Lu]

On Thu, May 29, 2008 at 2:31 PM, David Miller <davem@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> From: "Yinghai Lu" <yhlu.kernel@xxxxxxxxx>
> Date: Thu, 29 May 2008 13:55:16 -0700
>
>> driver should check fw version...
>
> This alone is not a reason to rip the firmware out into a seperate
> tree.  And I am absolutely not convinced that the cases where this
> matters all universally even use firmware versions.
>
> I've installed the wrong ipw2200 on several occaisions.
>
> Furthermore, it's about distributing what works with what it's meant
> to work with.  With this seperate scheme, I can still link in the
> wrong firmware file (the driver doesn't check the firmware version
> until it executes) and the driver won't work.  So this moves the
> validation to run time, which users typically don't appreciate.

I agree. I hate to have two klibc (one for 32 bit, and one for 64bit)
to for initramfs to load FW for qlogic...

dwmw2 's new patches to put all fw in /firmware, and built them into
kernel could avoid that...

and could make the build process to check fw version to match with
driver in different kernel version later...

YH
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