On Mon, 25 Oct 2004, Glenn Maynard wrote: > The driver is opening a block of data on disk, reading it and sending it > to the hardware. If that data does not exist, the driver will be > incapable of driving the hardware. For the driver to work, in addition > to installing it and the hardware device, you have to find and install > a copy of the firmware to where the driver expects to find it. > > Both the driver and the hardware require this block of data to be useful. > This is a clear-cut Depends:.
And if the device has an eprom, then "for the driver to work, you have to find and install an eprom containing a copy of the code". (The eprom is harder to lose, of course, so it's *usually* already installed, but it's not clear that that difference is relevant.)