On Tue, 14 Oct 2008, Paul Wise wrote: > On Tue, Oct 14, 2008 at 2:38 PM, Manoj Srivastava <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Seems like upstream udev firmware loader does look at > > /lib/firmware/$(uname -r)/, which seems sane. > > > > Why was this removed? > > It wasn't removed, upstream added that after the version of udev in Debian.
Not Debian. Ubuntu. And it caused quite a fight in LKML, too, which I won't bother to repeat here. Basically, there are three choices: 1. Package the firmware as the new kernel-package does (i.e. the Ubuntu way, which upstream udev now supports). 2. Do not package firmware at all when doing kernel builds and packages. People will have to get it from a firmware package (that doesn't exist), which has a new upstream (that exists, but doesn't have all the firmware in it yet), etc. 3. Add a new binary package to go along with the kernel-image, with the firmware for that kernel version. If you version the dirs, it is just (1) in a worse shape, so this calls for installing everything in /lib/firmware, and letting only one such binary package per system. Which has severe drawbacks if the firmware filenames are NOT versioned in the kernel code (they ARE supposed to be versioned, and it is a bug if they change without changing file name, except for bug fixes that are forward-and-backward compatible). Obviously, old versions of the firmware are not kept around forever inside the kernel tree, and it *will* cause issues with older kernels that wanted that old version of the firmware. This should happen *very* rarely (firmware really doesn't change much). The thruth is that this whole crap was *designed* with the agenda to make it as painful as possible for distros to distribute any in-kernel firmware, in order to force leverage to get all in-kernel firmware out of the kernel. -- "One disk to rule them all, One disk to find them. One disk to bring them all and in the darkness grind them. In the Land of Redmond where the shadows lie." -- The Silicon Valley Tarot Henrique Holschuh -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
