On 03/31/2013 10:38 AM, John Talbut wrote: > On 29/03/13 11:06, Arend van Spriel wrote: >> On 03/29/2013 07:14 AM, John Talbut wrote: >>> >>> As a matter of curiosity, why is the code currently in the firmware not >>> included in the kernel driver? >> >> Well. the kernel driver is what is running on the host. In your case on >> the Atom processor. The firmware contains of initialization data for the >> device and code that is using an instruction set that is dedicated to >> the broadcom device so there is no way to move that into the driver >> other than as a binary blob, but that is not acceptable in open-source >> Linux drivers. So people in the community invented the user-space >> firmware loading stuff. >> >> Gr. AvS > > Hi Arend > > Hmm. As I understand it, if the source code for the initialization data > for the device and code that is using an instruction set that is > dedicated to the broadcom device was released then the code could be > compiled into the kernel. > > Do you have any sense of why Broadcom does not do this?
Well. Your understanding is different from mine. Here is mine: the linux kernel aims for a separation between kernel code and firmware (mainly to resolve licensing issues, I think) and all drivers with embedded firmware have/are converted to using the request_firmware API. This is described in [1]. Gr. AvS [1] https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/firmware/README.AddingFirmware -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
