Re: netxen_nic support for unified firmware images
On Fri, Sep 03, 2010 at 11:55:42PM +0100, Ben Hutchings wrote:
> 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.
Thanks for the review, and sorry for my slow response.
Yeah, I also like to keep track of individual patches, but in this
case I did so by just keeping the changeset summaries at the top of
the unified patch. I have all of them stored as such in a local git
tree if we decide to go that way.
> > 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.
k. I'll commit the changes I have queued for this new package then.
> > 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.
dannf@hp.com> I am, thanks.
--
dann frazier
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