Marco d'Itri wrote:
> josh.trip@verizon.net wrote:
>>Given that the entire purpose of the driver is to actually *drive a
>>device*, and that it can't do that at all without the firmware, then the
>
> No, apparently you do not understand how the driver, hardware and
> firmware interact. The driver is fully functional as is: the firmware is
> needed by the hardware device, not by the driver.
Fully functional? Here's a snippet of code from such a driver:
if (request_firmware(&fw_entry, primary_fw_name,
spectrum_cs_device) == 0) {
primsym = fw_entry->data;
} else {
printk(KERN_ERR PFX "Cannot find firmware: %s\n",
primary_fw_name);
return -ENOENT;
}
So if you don't have the firmware installed (into
/usr/lib/hotplug/firmware/something_or_other), the driver will only
print an error message and return an error code. If that is your
definition of "fully functional", then perhaps we should include all the
programs in contrib that link to non-free shared libraries in main;
after all, someone might just want to see a linker error message. :)
- Josh Triplett
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