Firmware

[David Woodhouse]

On Mon, 2008-06-09 at 09:40 -0400, Don Zickus wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 09, 2008 at 11:04:08AM +0100, David Woodhouse wrote:
> > Been playing with how I'd make the kernel package deal with the new
> > 'make firmware_install' stuff. Currently looks something like this.
> 
> Is that something new upstream?  It would be great to separate the
> firmware from the kernel builds.

http://lwn.net/Articles/284104/
http://lwn.net/Articles/284932/

 git.infradead.org/users/dwmw2/firmware-2.6.git

> > 
> > I suspect that (for now) we should make the kernel binary packages
> > depend on kernel-firmware?
> > 
> > Should the package own the /lib/firmware/ directory?
> > 
> > Ideally we'll want kernel-firmware to be a .noarch.rpm, but we can't get
> > that until we start to build it from a separate srpm.
> 
> I assume the %install would cause a rebuild of the initrd to deal with
> storage device firmware on bootup?

The kernel install already does that. Perhaps we should ensure that
kernel-firmware gets updated before the kernel proper, to ensure that
the new firmware is included. 

> We were trying to do this with RHEL (jcm was working on this).  One of the
> issues I brought up (which no one had a solution for) was the case for a
> bad firmware for storage devices.  Currently they are built into the
> kernel.  So if you stumble upon bad firmware, you just boot the previous
> working kernel.  How would this be handled with everything under
> /lib/firmware?  I guess a previously working initrd image might suffice.

Yeah, the previous kernel would have had its initrd generated when that
kernel was installed. That initrd should continue to work.

-- 
dwmw2