firmware loading

[Max Laier]

On Wednesday 21 December 2005 06:54, Sam Leffler wrote:
> Florent Thoumie and I have been working on some generic support for
> loading firmware using kld's.  You can find a proof of concept at:
>
> http://www.freebsd.org/~sam/firmware.tgz
>
> It has code to manage firmware images and load them on demand by
> requesting a kld through standard facilities.  Firmware is packaged
> using a genfw program that's included.  You can package one or more
> firmware images in a single kld.  I've packaged the iwi firmware as a
> boot image in a single kld + kld's for each operating mode that have two
> firmware images.  The tarball also includes modified versions of the iwi
> and ipw drivers to use the code.  I tested iwi, Florent is working on ipw.
>
> If you're interested in this stuff feel free to pick it up; I've run out
> of time to work on it.  There are some potential issues with holding
> locks over the linker calls and the genfw program could use some TLC and
> probably a new name (plus the man page needs to be completed).

I am generally interested and will probably look at it between Christmas and 
the New Year - unless Damien wants to look at it himself.  The current scheme 
of loading the firmware is disfunctional with a WITNESS enabled kernel (too 
much "sleep while holding mutex") and needs to be fixed anyway.

Is this work in perforce?  Is Florent still actively working on it?

> It appears ispfw can be reworked to use this code.  iwi and ipw
> definitely can use it.  Not sure who else can/should use it.

-- 
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