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Re: netxen_nic support for unified firmware images



On Thu, 2010-09-02 at 17:20 -0600, dann frazier wrote:
> I'd like to propose we add support for unified firmware images for
> netxen nics for squeeze.
> 
> HP ships servers with netxen controllers, and we've seen problems with
> old firmware/new driver combinations - basically the network runs
> ridiculously slow, causing network installs to take many
> hours. Flashing to the latest firmware resolves the issues - but
> flashing a system (or 50) before install can be a pain (once you've
> finally identified firmware as the problem). There's an online flash
> tool you can use post-install but, as of this writing, it is not
> very Debian friendly (distributed in an RPM, needs out of tree driver,
> script has incompatible paths/bashisms).
> 
> netxen_nic can load updated firmware via request_firmware, and
> recently a firmware blob got accepted into the linux-firmware tree w/
> a non-free-compatible license, specifically for this reason. However,
> this blob is in a newer "unified" format that the 2.6.32 driver didn't
> yet support.
> 
> This patch cherry picks the change to add support for the unified rom
> image, as well as several fixes that came after.

I prefer to deal with individual patches as it's easier to compare them
with the upstream version that way.  I'm not sure how much that matters
here.

> In addition, I'd like to also package the firmware blob. The blob
> alone is 1.7 MB, whereas the entire contents of firmware-linux-nonfree
> is 940K. That implies to me that it should be a new binary package,
> but I don't feel strongly about that.

It should be.

> Any objections to these changes?

AFAIK only HP shipped many of these NICs so if you (wearing your HP hat)
are happy with the changes then that's good enough for me.

Ben.

-- 
Ben Hutchings
Once a job is fouled up, anything done to improve it makes it worse.

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