Re: Amendment: special exception for firmware because of technical limitations
Sven Luther wrote:
> I heard claims of buginess in the patch,
The buggy one was my radeon patch. It's rather hard to get right because
of the complex interaction between X and the kernel, and because the DRI
trunk doesn't like Linux-specific things, and we never did track down the
problem. I'm not going to tackle that one again for a while -- I think it
needs someone who is both good at Linux kernel development *and* understands
the exact structure of the DRI system.
There was one bug in the tg3 patch which Herbert Xu spotted and fixed
related to having multiple tg3 boards present at once.
As an aside, the tg3 driver is an ugly piece of work, because nearly
the whole thing is in a single spinlock.
> due in big part for the missing
> upstream support for proper firmware loading
Actually, kernel support was pretty much there by the time I wrote the tg3
patch.
The userland tools weren't quite mature, however, which they are now.
Back then not everyone was using hotplug (which was required), but
now everyone uses udev. That probably makes a difference. Also, initially
the firmware could only be loaded from /usr, which obviously irritated a lot
of people; now it can be loaded from the root partition.
> and probably the absense of
> initramfs support, as we have now.
Yes, there was some complaint about the lack of easy support for
installing the firmware in the initrd. Which is not technically a bug,
but the lack of a feature (netmounted root for those boards which need
firmware loading).
Isn't this still an issue? :-/ Doesn't it require udev to run in the
initramfs, and isn't that not-yet-ready? (Although desired upstream,
from what I remember -- this is the "early userland" stuff)
Frankly, people who netmount root and use network cards requiring firmware
loading are a pretty small group. But it would be nice to make it work for
them.
> Friendly,
>
> Sven Luther
We are getting way off topic for -vote.
--
Nathanael Nerode <neroden@fastmail.fm>
Bush admitted to violating FISA and said he was proud of it.
So why isn't he in prison yet?...
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