firmware loading

[Scott Long]

Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:
> In message <43A8EE23.3010202 at errno.com>, Sam Leffler writes:
> 
>>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.
> 
> 
> Is the firmware kld unloaded again when no longer in use, or does it
> stay in KVM once as long as the driver is active ?
> 

Right now it stays resident.  My understanding is that the wireless
cards that this was designed for need to reload their firmware after
resume.  We don't have any hooks to tell drivers when the filesystem
is ready, so the only non-hackish solution right now is to just keep
it resident.  I agree that this isn't ideal, and I would think that it
would be pretty trivial to add an event handler hook to solve this.
The other thing that I'm not sure about is whether this being a module
dependency will prevent it from being unloaded.  I'm not sure how
ispfw.ko handles this.

Scott