Re: ipw(4) driver

[Joerg Sonnenberger <joerg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

CCed Damien

On Tue, Nov 02, 2004 at 07:55:55PM +0000, Johannes Hofmann wrote:
> - For the driver to work, some external firmware from INTEL is needed,
>   that has
>   licensing issues. Damien is trying to resolve this problem. But as the 
>   firmware is not compiled into the kernel module this is not that much of
>   an issue, I think.

I'm working on both ipw(4) and iwi(4) for inclusion. There's one important
point I want to discuss publically before commiting. How do we want to
handle the firmware? I personally prefer the way e.g. wi(4) handles the
firmware with directly embedding it into the kernel module / kernel image.
This simplifies the code a lot and with minor modifications would allow us
to support e.g. diskless operation.

The disadvantage is that for now, the user has to manually build the driver
after putting the firmware in some known location. Another aspect is of course
that the Intel firmware is limited in its functionality, you might want to
switch it.

The third option would be a general firmware framework, but I'm not sure if
it is that useful.

Joerg