On Tue, Apr 05, 2005 at 11:28:07AM +0200, Arjan van de Ven wrote:One of the sticking points will be how people get the firmware; I can see the point of a kernel-distributable-firmware project related to the kernel (say on kernel.org) which would provide a nice collection of distributable firmwares (and is appropriately licensed). Without such joint infrastructure things will always be a mess and in that context I can see the point of the driver authors not immediately wanting to switch exclusively. Simply because they'll get swamped with email about how the driver doesn't work...
I agree. And that really doesn't need a lot of infrastructure, basically just a tarball that unpacks to /lib/firmware, maybe a specfile and debian/ dir in addition.
At the moment there is -zero- infrastructure that would allow my tg3 to continue working, when I upgrade to a tg3 driver with external firmware.
The user has to put a file in some location manually.
That's a complete non-starter, from a usability standpoint.
Further, several firmwares, including tg3, are really a collection of bits of information: .text, .bss, and random variables (start addr, image size, ...). The current interface is complete crap for this sort of setup.
The firmware loader really needs to be loading -archives- not individual files.
We are a -long- way from moving the firmware out of the tg3 source code.
Jeff
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