Re: [oe] [meta-oe][PATCH] firmwared: add recipe

["Ross Burton" <ross@burtonini.com>]

Fair enough, thanks.  Pretty slim use case if most distributions turn
it off, and the tool is unmaintained.  I wonder if anyone is testing
that codepath...

Ross

On Tue, 8 Dec 2020 at 15:33, Robert Karszniewicz
<r.karszniewicz@phytec.de> wrote:
>
> On 12/7/20 11:49 AM, Ross Burton wrote:
> > Last touched four years ago.  Isn't this what udev does?  If this is
> > for people who don't want udev, I suggest you make that clear in the
> > summary.
>
> It's not a matter of whether they want to, but they can't. At least from
> what I
> can see, udev has removed support for loading firmware six years ago.
> Am I missing something?
>
> See this paragraph in kernel documentation
> Documentation/driver-api/firmware/fallback-mechanisms.rst:
>
>    Different implementations have been supported in userspace to take
> advantage of
>    this fallback mechanism. When firmware loading was only possible
> using the
>    sysfs mechanism the userspace component "hotplug" provided the
> functionality of
>    monitoring for kobject events. Historically this was superseded be
> systemd's
>    udev, however firmware loading support was removed from udev as of
> systemd
>    commit be2ea723b1d0 ("udev: remove userspace firmware loading support")
>    as of v217 on August, 2014. This means most Linux distributions today are
>    not using or taking advantage of the firmware fallback mechanism provided
>    by kobject uevents. This is specially exacerbated due to the fact
> that most
>    distributions today disable CONFIG_FW_LOADER_USER_HELPER_FALLBACK.
>
> Regards,
> Robert