On Thu, 13 Dec 2001 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > Absolutely. But note, that is not the only problem: If the driver has to > > manage dynamic loading of different overlaid firmware images at runtime > > Are there devices that really do that ?
Yep. Right here in front of me ;-) Note that the Cypress docs for the ezusb family do explicitly mention this as a feature of the mcu's. So nobody should be surprized if devices would appear which make use of it. From the device makers' POV this approach might have several benefits compared to an additional SRAM as an alternative solution. > For these devices you need support in the device driver itself. Right. But it could still use a centralized download manager which provides the in-kernel representations of the firmware image(s) and comes with some helper routines to do the actual download. > [..] > > Is there really a need for the driver to register a download request ? Depends on how general you want it to be made. For simple support of load-single-image-once-at-init-or-resume probably not. But even some existing drivers under usb/serial have several firmware parts with one acting as a bootloader for the other one. So one would probably need to start introducing special cases anyway. > IMHO it would be better if the firmware device driver simply was fed ids > and firmware images from user space and worked idependently. Agreed. But how should the centralized firmware device driver know, when to load which part(s) of the firmware in which order? Well, one could add all existing options to the firmware device driver and let each firmware image come with some heuristics - but I really believe this is drivers job to get it right. Just think of a multi-config device which needs a different firmware overlay section for different configs. I just started from an approach claiming we want to provide the driver the ability to load chunks of binary blurb to its device - whenever he wants to do so - without need to block for some userland support at this very moment. So we just need an entity which collects the images donated from userland (an now being ready for immediate use) and otherwise just sits waiting to serve driver requests asking for references to these images. Regards, Martin _______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe, use the last form field at: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/linux-usb-devel
