Firmware

[Don Zickus]

On Mon, Jun 09, 2008 at 03:15:05PM +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:
> > > 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

Thanks for the links.  The discussion was helpful.

> 
> > > 
> > > 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. 

Or maybe always rebuild initrd when installing kernel-firmware?  It's a
little overkill but handles scenarios when the vendor updates their
storage blob but we have no new kernel update to go with it (that's
probably a little long term thinking to handle the scenario when you
actually separate the srpms..).

> 
> > 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.

Yeah, not sure why I didn't think of this months ago when I was discussing
this with folks internally.

Cheers,
Don