Firmware

[Jon Masters]

On Mon, 2008-06-09 at 15:15 +0100, David Woodhouse wrote:
> 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:

> http://lwn.net/Articles/284104/
> http://lwn.net/Articles/284932/
> 
>  git.infradead.org/users/dwmw2/firmware-2.6.git

Yup, I was going to reply with those links - especially the reply from
the other Dave on pulling out firmware from the kernel :)

> > 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. 

Good idea. But yeah, mkinitrd already looks for firmware files (those
tagged with MODULE_FIRMWARE macros) and pulls them in.

> > 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.

Another issue that we never really solved was that we really need to
have one firmware package per firmware (group) so that others can
possibly override their firmware without replacing the entire
kernel-firmware package and affecting everyone. Opinion?

Jon.