Bug#725714: the kernel should write missing firmware to a file
Hi,
Thanks, Kay, for the very fast response and the detailed reasoning.
Your arguments convinced me, that it is technically a very good idea to
keep userspace out of the firmware loading. This should definitely not
be reintroduced upstream or in the Debian version of udev. (Originally
I thought the problem was caused by the kernel, since it is not obvious,
why the kernel would need another program to load a firmware-kernel-module.)
It seems that the kernel now handles the actual loading of the firmware,
but does not write missing drivers to a file.
In fact, I'm inclined to reassign this to linux again, because I think
this could be easily fixed in the kernel:
In the 3. step Ben described, the kernel should, instead of calling
udev, write the missing firmware to some file. The kernel just has to
find out, which file a specific firmware request is referring to. (The
4. and 5. steps are already removed from udev.)
Then the installer would just need to update the path, where it is
looking for this file, and it would work again as before. (Also
gnome-settings-daemon should just update the
GSD_UPDATES_FIRMWARE_MISSING_DIR.)
The next step would be to update the kernel handling of the firmware
requests, to only write them to the file, when the firmware is actually
needed. But I'm not sure how that could be done. (Note that this is not
required for the Debian installer to work again.)
So I think isenkram is not needed. Looking at the commit, it would
probably not be helpful as well, because it would try to download the
WLAN driver!?!
Best regards,
Andreas
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