userland firmware loader?

[Brian Fundakowski Feldman]

On Sat, Jul 10, 2004 at 10:38:36AM +0200, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:
> In message <20040709232355.GB1626 at green.homeunix.org>, Brian Fundakowski Feldma
> n writes:
> 
> >I'm writing a driver that uses a 100KB firmware file and could need to
> >read it again, after initialization, to reset the device (or to load
> >more).  Since this device is primarily found in CardBus form, I think
> >it makes a lot of sense to be able to get the firmware file at any time
> >but without specific user intervention.
> >
> >Is this something devd should be doing? 
> 
> I would advocate a generic interface for retrieving firmware from userland.

What do you think about using the normal devctl_notify(9) for pushing
out firmware requests, and having a new device method that receives just
a user data pointer and length for it to copyin(9)?  It wouldn't be a
very symmetrical API, but it seems like a way that might fit it into the
current structure the easiest, devd and devctl and newbus.

-- 
Brian Fundakowski Feldman                           \'[ FreeBSD ]''''''''''\
  <> green at FreeBSD.org                               \  The Power to Serve! \
 Opinions expressed are my own.                       \,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,\