Re: firmware discussion

[Aggelos Economopoulos <aoiko@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Joe Talbott wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 04, 2010 at 08:46:47AM +0100, Sascha Wildner wrote:
>> Am 03.03.2010 18:11, schrieb Joe Talbott:
>>> My personal feeling is that we should do whatever
>>> we can to make porting drivers as easy as possible.
>> Port from where? We've not only ported drivers from FreeBSD in the past.
> 
> My initial thought was to include both APIs though this would likely
> lead to confusion.

So, I was discussing the situation with firmware we can't redistribute
legally. Getting the user to download it in, say, /etc/firmware would be
easy enough, but apparently the freebsd firmware interface we've
recently adopted to make the wireless sync easier assumes the firmware
is contained in a module.

This seems suboptimal to say the least. We don't want to have to build a
module on the spot for each arbitrary file. One solution would be to
have the kernel look into /etc/firmware at firmware_get() time
(including some hack about the version number). Another would be to
convert everything to use our old interface (straightforward, but some
work). Yet another would be to let users of devices that require
firmware that we can't distribute know that we're sorry for their plight
but they're on their own.

Which do we want to go with? Any other ideas?

Aggelos