Firmware upgrade for CNA

[John Baldwin]

On Sunday, December 04, 2011 1:04:12 pm Naresh wrote:
> Hi All,
> 
> Our product is a CNA i.e it supports both 10G Ethernet and Storage. We need to provide firmware upgrade facility through our FreeBSD nic driver.
> 
> The driver should be able to flash any version of the firmware when provided.
> 
> Asuuming driver is already loaded flashing steps should be something like 
> 1) User will invoke flashing by providing the image name and file path.
> 2) Driver should load the image from the path and start flashing.
> 3) Return the flashing status to the user.
> 
> I looked into load_firmware FreeBSD mechanism. But it requires image to be 
> converted to loadable module, load image module and then invoke driver using sysctl to start flashing. 
> 
> Is there any standard way other than load_firmware ? Can we open and read a file in the driver?
> 
> In Linux, we copy the image to /lib/firmware and invoke flashing using something like "ethtool -f eth0 image". 
> Then kernel loads the image file from 
> /lib/firmware to a data buffer and invokes the driver. The driver then flashes and return status.
> 
> Is there a approach in FreeBSD something similar to Linux ?

There is not a framework along those lines, no.  However, you could provide an
ioctl which accepts a data buffer and have a small userland utility that takes
the filename as an argument, loads it into a local buffer, then invokes your
ioctl.

-- 
John Baldwin