Messages in this thread |  | | From | Paul Gortmaker <> | Subject | Drivers with firmware (was Re: Linux-2.0.1) | Date | Fri, 5 Jul 1996 02:41:17 +1000 (EST) |
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- From Alan Cox (alan@cymru.net) Thu, 4 Jul 1996 10:09:05 +0100 (BST)
> > Developers: I will NOT accept large patches any more. If you find bugs, > > go for the one-liner obvious bugfix rather than a rewrite. Due to me > > being abroad I couldn't work as closely with people on 2.0.1 patches as I > > need to, but I'm back, and this kind of mega-patch will NOT happen again.. > > Does this include drivers as we will need to add a fairly large driver > chunk because the Metricom firmware has changed. That should all be a > single clean driver not affecting other files.
As the hardware trend seems to be towards downloadable firmware onto ROM-less cards, it might make sense to encourage associated drivers to use compressed firmware files in conjunction with lib/inflate.c at least for those cases where it makes sense to do so.
Here is a case in point:
----------------------------------------------------------------- foo:/tmp/linux/drivers/net> ls -l dgrs_firmware.c -rw-r--r-- 1 gpg109 users 579161 Apr 20 18:22 dgrs_firmware.c foo:/tmp/linux/drivers/net> gzip -cv9 dgrs_firmware.c | wc -c dgrs_firmware.c: 88.6% 65714 foo:/tmp/linux/drivers/net> -----------------------------------------------------------------
It is worth noting however that the dgrs driver has the option of not directly slurping up the firmware into the driver data.
Paul. -- main(){long i,f,m=19248;f=open("/dev/tty",0);if(!fork())for(;;i++,ioctl(f,m, (1<<23)+(rand()&2047)),ioctl(f,m+2,rand()%8),sleep(1));} /* Linux Console */
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