Subject: Re: ipw2100: firmware problem

From: Jeff Garzik <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 09 Jun 2005 02:29:42 -0400

David S. Miller wrote:
> From: Jeff Garzik <[email-masked]>
> Date: Thu, 09 Jun 2005 02:06:05 -0400
> 
> 
>>Therefore, the easiest way to make things work today is to poke Intel to 
>>fix their firmware license so that we can distribute it with the kernel :)
> 
> 
> Seperate firmware from the in-kernel driver is a big headache for
> users.  As DaveJ has stated, people make mistakes and try to match up
> the wrong firmware version with the driver and stuff like that.  And
> he should know as he has to deal sift through bogus bug reports from
> people running into this problem.
> 
> If it's integrated, there are no problems like this.

Early userspace is (a) shipped with the kernel source tree and (b) 
linked into vmlinux.  That's integrated.

The firmware images will be separate from the .c files (as they should 
be), but the kernel hacker still controls what gets loaded, and when.

But like I said, that's where we're going, not where we are now.

	Jeff