On Tue, 14 Oct 2008, Felipe Sateler wrote: > Please hit me with the cluebat; apparently I'm not understanding anything. Why > would I want to have more than one firmware installed? AIUI, the firmware is
The firmware has an ABI to the kernel driver. If it changes, both have to change. This has happened with, e.g., ipw2200 (which has out-of-tree firmware). I have no idea if this ever happened to one of the drivers with in-tree firmware. But it is a very rare event, that much I have to agree with the people who made this mess. > interface in a backwards-incompatible manner. And I guess the kernel should > ignore hardware features the firmware doesn't support. The worst case scenario That's not how it works. The way it works is that it can easily blow up in flames if it uses the wrong version of the firmware by mistake. Or (FAR more likely) it just doesn't enable the device at all because it cannot find the correct version of the firmware it wants (if everyone did their job right and changed the firmware name when they changed the firmware). -- "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]
