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From: "Luis R. Rodriguez" <mcgrof@do-not-panic.com>
Date: Thu, 17 Dec 2015 11:16:09 -0800
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Subject: Re: [PATCH 1/4] firmware: generalize "firmware" as "system data" helpers
To: Josh Boyer <jwboyer@fedoraproject.org>,
        Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>,
        Daniel Vetter <daniel.vetter@intel.com>
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On Thu, Oct 8, 2015 at 1:16 PM, Josh Boyer <jwboyer@fedoraproject.org> wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 6, 2015 at 5:08 AM, Greg KH <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org> wrote:
>> Just responding to one thing at the moment:
>>
>> On Mon, Oct 05, 2015 at 11:22:22PM +0200, Luis R. Rodriguez wrote:
>>>   * we should phase out the usermode helper from firmware_class long term
>>
>> You can "phase out", but you can not delete it as it's a user/kernel api
>> that we have to support for forever, sorry.
>
> Assuming that dell-rbu is the only in-tree legitimate user of the
> userhelper code, I'm curious if the code itself could simply move into
> that driver.  It might help prevent the spread of reliance on an API
> we don't want to see grow in usage.  We'd probably need to evaluate if
> the two new users could migrate off that.

Greg pointed out Daniel might have some uses for this. More on this later.

>> Also, for some devices / use cases, the usermode helper is the solution
>> (think async loading of firmware when the host wants to do it.)
>
> Are any of those use cases in the kernel today, aside from dell-rbu?
> Would Luis' async mode to system data suffice?

We'll have to see based on Daniel's feedback (Daniel, please respond
to the other thread I'll Cc you on).

 Luis