On Fri, Jan 11, 2008 at 10:48:31AM -0500, Andrew Boyd wrote:
> Hiya.  Just thought I'd toss this out for discussion.
> 
> I'm writing a new network driver, and it has some
> fairly large (100+ kbytes) firmware binaries which
> must be downloaded by the driver during initialization.
> 
> Question: where should these firmware binaries
> be located?
> 
> One option is to put them into the driver .so which
> is nice & neat wrt packaging & version control, but
> this bloats the driver unnecessarily consuming ram.
> 
> Second option to to have them as external files
> but this creates packaging & versioning hassles.
> 
> Opinions on the above?  Creative suggestions for 
> other options?

As a data point, wpi already loads from a file as we can't
ship its firmware.

# io-pkt -dwpi firmware=/fullpath/to/firmware

-seanb

Andrew Boyd wrote: 

Hiya.  Just thought I'd toss this out for discussion. 

I'm writing a new network driver, and it has some 
fairly large (100+ kbytes) firmware binaries which 
must be downloaded by the driver during initialization. 

Question: where should these firmware binaries 
be located? 

One option is to put them into the driver .so which 
is nice & neat wrt packaging & version control, but 
this bloats the driver unnecessarily consuming ram.

As long as the firmware was alone in a page aligned region you could unmap
it after use, I guess.




Second option to to have them as external files 
but this creates packaging & versioning hassles.

This allows for firmware updates though.




Opinions on the above?  Creative suggestions for 
other options?

I think it should be in the driver, but with the option for reading it from
an external file.  The best of both worlds...




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