Some thoughts about firmware inclusion.

[Jon Masters]

On Mon, 2007-10-22 at 10:20 -0400, Jesse Keating wrote:
> On Mon, 22 Oct 2007 10:06:24 -0400
> Jon Masters <jcm at redhat.com> wrote:
> 
> > On a tangent, I would like to have a discussion about in-kernel
> > firmware as it becomes split out and loaded using request_firmware.
> > So that third parties can supply different firmware updates, can we
> > agree that it's worthwhile having one firmware package for each
> > firmware file set needed by the kernel package, in the longer term?
> 
> These wouldn't turn into kmod like packages would they, and have all
> the same kludges to work with RPM?  Are you going to have to handle
> different firmware sets for each kernel version you might have
> installed, plus alternatives from upstream?  Obviously I'm a bit
> reluctant to reintroduce nightmares like this.

The problem is if a user needs to upgrade the firmware for some card,
they can't do this if the file for that firmware lives inside the kernel
package (well, they can abuse the breakage in RPM for multilib and
possibly get away with another package owning the file, but...). If
we're interested in allowing firmware upgrades to happen outside of the
kernel (which is one reason it split out upstream), then this is needed.

Would love to hear comments ;-)

Jon.