:is it really necessary to do it this way? cause i don't like the idea
:of using a user space program for directing the driver to load the
:firmware. instead the firmware can be loaded and cached during the
:device attach routine.
:
:the firmware_image_load_file can be the appropriate candidate for such
:functionality provided that it just returns the raw data from the
:/etc/xxx firmware file without allocating the dma resources.
:
:Cheers
:kmb
The root filesystem will not be mounted during driver attach so
the kernel will not have access to the filesystem. But there are
a couple of other possibilities:
(1) You could embed the firmware as a const char [] array in the
source code itself. It would depend how big the firmware image is...
if it's really big I'd rather not embed it in source code.
There might also be a copyright issue with the firmware that prevents
it from being embeddable in the source code.
(2) The firmware could be loaded into kernel memory as a module by
the boot loader. The boot loader does have access to the root
filesystem (usually). The driver would then be able to locate and
access it at attach time.
(3) There is a kernel firmware loading facility in
sys/kern/kern_firmware.c. Again, the file cannot be loaded at
attach time but this way you could have an ioctl that just passes
the filename to the driver as part of the RC boot sequence
and the driver could then use the kern_firmware.c facility to
actually get an image map into kernel memory.
Method #1 or #3 is probably the best way to do it. Method #2 requires
more configuration glue and changes in the loader config.
-Matt
Matthew Dillon
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
