Qlogic firmware isn't in the FC7 kernel

[Jeremy Katz]

On Fri, 2007-03-30 at 13:15 -0400, Chuck Ebbert wrote:
> Jon Masters wrote:
> > Josh Boyer wrote:
> >> On Thu, 2007-03-29 at 16:16 -0400, Chuck Ebbert wrote:
> >>> Apparently the qlogic drivers don't have any firmware included in FC7,
> >>> so nobody can actually use a qlogic adapter. Should we be patching the
> >>> kernel like in FC6 or do we need a separate package? Or maybe the
> >>> firmware goes in the kernel package?
> >>>
> >>> Peter says the support for Anaconda / mkinitrd to load the firmware
> >>> is already written, so we could do it either way.
> >>
> >> If it fits these guidelines:
> >> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging/Guidelines#BinaryFirmware
> > 
> > Yeah. I saw those. But the problem is that this might be needed in the
> > bootpath. We /probably/ don't want the kernel package depending on a
> > billion of these other packages for the moment - do we? Wouldn't it just
> > be easier to have the firmware in that package for now, since it used to
> > be in the kernel anyway? Eventually we need to fix this differently.
> 
> Hey, mkinitrd is required too and it's not part of the kernel package.
> After thinking about it, I vote for a separate package if it doesn't cause
> too much pain.

For fresh installs, it's not a big deal.  We can stick the firmware
package in the hardware support group which is installed by default and
so people will usually be fine[1].  

For upgrades, though, we have no indicator to tell yum/anaconda that
this new package is needed for the hardware to be functional.  Which
means that people do an upgrade, the new package doesn't get installed
and people are left with a non-functional system.  Any answer for this
kind of sucks as it's either something like a requires in the kernel
package or a one-off hack :/

Jeremy

[1] Eventually we probably need to do something to help ensure that you
don't deselect it, but for the purposes of Fedora 7 we can probably get
away with saying "don't do that"