On 11/22/2022 12:06 AM, Paul Cercueil wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> As a week-end project I got the BCM4330 chip to work with the mainline 
> Linux kernel on the MIPS CI20 board. One of the problems I was facing 
> was the firmware crashing, resulting in timeout errors in the brcmfmac 
> driver.
> 
> It turns out the bcm4330-sdio.bin firmware that's currently in 
> linux-firmware is not the latest one. Running "strings" on the blob 
> points out to a version 5.90.125.104 dated 2011-10-25. The firmware that 
> originally came on the CI20 is version 5.90.195.26 dated 2012-05-09, and 
> the version found in Android [1] is 5.90.195.114 dated 2013-01-23. Only 
> the last two will work on the CI20 board.
> 
> My question then, could we bump the firmware available in linux-firmware 
> to the latest version? Or is there a valid reason why an older firmware 
> is kept in the tree?

We "Broadcom" could. The linux-firmware repo provides all firmware that 
linux distro can freely redistribute. The license info is listed in the 
README in the repo as are the applicable firmware license documents. So 
releasing the firmware to linux-firmware under the given license can 
only be done by anyone owning it, not by people licensed to use it.

The bcm4330 chip was one of the first chips that brcmfmac supported and 
Broadcom has EOL-ed that chip a long time ago hence no newer firmware 
was considered for release to linux-firmware. In the past we often 
re-released what was available in Android so we probably can do that 
again for this and other chips.

Regards,
Arend