From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Subject: Re: [bug?] tg3: Failed to load firmware "tigon/tg3_tso.bin" From: David Woodhouse In-Reply-To: <92840.1215113467@turing-police.cc.vt.edu> References: <20080703020236.adaa51fa.akpm@linux-foundation.org> <20080703205548.D6E5.KOSAKI.MOTOHIRO@jp.fujitsu.com> <486CC440.9030909@garzik.org> <486CCFED.7010308@garzik.org> <1215091999.10393.556.camel@pmac.infradead.org> <486CD654.4020605@garzik.org> <1215093175.10393.567.camel@pmac.infradead.org> <20080703173040.GB30506@mit.edu> <1215111362.10393.651.camel@pmac.infradead.org> <92840.1215113467@turing-police.cc.vt.edu> Content-Type: text/plain Date: Thu, 03 Jul 2008 20:49:00 +0100 Message-Id: <1215114540.10393.659.camel@pmac.infradead.org> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-linux-mm@kvack.org Return-Path: To: Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu Cc: Theodore Tso , Jeff Garzik , Hugh Dickins , Andrew Morton , KOSAKI Motohiro , mchan@broadcom.com, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, linux-mm@kvack.org, netdev@vger.kernel.org List-ID: On Thu, 2008-07-03 at 15:31 -0400, Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu wrote: > On Thu, 03 Jul 2008 19:56:02 BST, David Woodhouse said: > > > They had to 'make oldconfig' and then actually _choose_ to say 'no' to > > an option which is fairly clearly documented, that they are the > > relatively unusual position of wanting to have said 'yes' to. You're > > getting into Aunt Tillie territory, when you complain about that. > > Note that some of us chose 'no' because we *thought* that we already *had* > everything in /lib/firmware that we needed (in my case, the iwl3945 wireless > firmware and the Intel cpu microcode). The first that I realized that > the tg3 *had* firmware was when I saw the failure message, because before > that, the binary blob was inside the kernel. And then, it wasn't trivially > obvious how to get firmware loaded if the tg3 driver was builtin rather > than a module. > > And based on some of the other people who apparently got bit by this same > exact behavior change on this same exact "builtin but no firmware in kernel" > config with this same exact driver, it's obvious that one of two things is true: > > 1) Several of the highest-up maintainers are Aunt Tillies. > or > 2) This is sufficiently subtle and complicated that far more experienced > people than Aunt Tillie will Get It Very Wrong. Not really. It's just a transitional thing. As you said, you know perfectly well that modern Linux drivers like iwl3945 handle their firmware separately through request_firmware() rather than including it in unswappable memory in the static kernel. We're just updating some of the older drivers to match. I've often managed to configure a kernel which doesn't boot, when I've updated and not paid attention to the questions which 'oldconfig' asks me. It's fairly easy to do. But I don't advocate that 'allyesconfig' should be the default, just in case someone needs one of the options... But as I said, I'm content to let Linus make that decision. In the meantime, I'd prefer to get back to the simple business of updating drivers to use request_firmware() as they should, and have maintainers actually respond to the _patches_ rather than refusing to even look at the code changes because they disagree with the default setting for the CONFIG_FIRMWARE_IN_KERNEL option. -- dwmw2 -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@kvack.org. For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ . Don't email: email@kvack.org