firmware loading

[Sam Leffler]

Max Laier wrote:
> 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.

I can't recall if that's the driver's lock being held over linker calls 
that are potentially blocking, but if you can resolve this then I can 
also re-enable dynamic loading of 802.11 crypto modules.

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

It's not in perforce.  Florent has already responded.
> 
> 
>>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.
> 
>