From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Date: Fri, 4 Jul 2008 10:10:14 -0400 From: Theodore Tso Subject: Re: [bug?] tg3: Failed to load firmware "tigon/tg3_tso.bin" Message-ID: <20080704141014.GA23215@mit.edu> References: <1215093175.10393.567.camel@pmac.infradead.org> <20080703173040.GB30506@mit.edu> <1215111362.10393.651.camel@pmac.infradead.org> <20080703.162120.206258339.davem@davemloft.net> <486D6DDB.4010205@infradead.org> <87ej6armez.fsf@basil.nowhere.org> <1215177044.10393.743.camel@pmac.infradead.org> <486E2260.5050503@garzik.org> <1215178035.10393.763.camel@pmac.infradead.org> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <1215178035.10393.763.camel@pmac.infradead.org> Sender: owner-linux-mm@kvack.org Return-Path: To: David Woodhouse Cc: Jeff Garzik , Andi Kleen , David Miller , hugh@veritas.com, akpm@linux-foundation.org, kosaki.motohiro@jp.fujitsu.com, mchan@broadcom.com, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, linux-mm@kvack.org, netdev@vger.kernel.org List-ID: On Fri, Jul 04, 2008 at 02:27:15PM +0100, David Woodhouse wrote: > > That's the way it has been for a _long_ time anyway, for any modern > driver which uses request_firmware(). The whole point about modules is > _modularity_. Yes, that means that sometimes they depend on _other_ > modules, or on firmware. > > The scripts which handle that kind of thing have handled inter-module > dependencies, and MODULE_FIRMWARE(), for a long time now. FYI, at least Ubuntu Hardy's initramfs does not seem to deal with firmware for modules correctly. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/initramfs-tools/+bug/180544 And remember, kernel/userspace interfaces are things which are far more careful about than kernel ABI interfaces.... You can flame about Ubuntu being broken (and I predict you will :-), but there are a large number of users who do use Ubuntu. And so adding more breakages when it is *known* the distro's aren't moving as quickly as you think is reasonable for quote, modern, unquote, drivers is something you can flame about, but at the end of the day, *you* are the one introducing changes that is causing more breakages. Userspace interfaces (and this includes things like mkinitramfs/mkinitrd, since we made the design decision --- in my opinion a very bad decision --- to make initrd/initramfs creation it a distro-specific thing instead of somethign where the kernel supplies the scripts) by their very nature move much more slowly than things which are inside the "shipped by the kernel" boundary. And sometimes people like to take a RHEL4 or RHEL5 (or Ubuntu Hardy) kernel and compile and build a much newer kernel from kernel.org, and it is *highly* unfortunate when this breaks. After all, for people who care to test our kernel.org kernels, we want to encourage them, yes? More testers of kernel.org testers is something which I've heard akpm claim is a good thing.... I do think your idea of including "make firmware_install" into "make modules_install" does make a lot of sense, because it will reduce the number of breakages. It won't eliminate them, but it will reduce them. Regards, - Ted -- 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