Re: Problems loading firmware using built-in drivers with kernels that use initramfs.

From: Takashi Iwai <tiwai@suse.de>
To: "Luis R. Rodriguez" <mcgrof@suse.com>
Cc: Liam Girdwood <liam.r.girdwood@intel.com>,
	"Jie, Yang" <yang.jie@intel.com>,
	joonas.lahtinen@linux.intel.com,
	Dmitry Torokhov <dmitry.torokhov@gmail.com>,
	Tom Gundersen <teg@jklm.no>, Ming Lei <ming.lei@canonical.com>,
	Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>,
	Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>,
	Kay Sievers <kay@vrfy.org>,
	Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>,
	David Woodhouse <dwmw2@infradead.org>,
	mcgrof@do-not-panic.com, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: Problems loading firmware using built-in drivers with kernels that use initramfs.
Date: Tue, 25 Aug 2015 21:46:48 +0200	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <s5h4mjnnobb.wl-tiwai@suse.de> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20150825193408.GR8051@wotan.suse.de>

On Tue, 25 Aug 2015 21:34:08 +0200,
Luis R. Rodriguez wrote:
> 
> On Tue, Aug 25, 2015 at 10:17:00AM +0100, David Woodhouse wrote:
> > Luis, did you tell me the other day that you made the kernel get firmware
> > directly from the file system? This regression would be yours then?
> 
> I didn't implement that, Linus did in 2012 (see commit abb139e75c2c titled
> "firmware: teach the kernel to load firmware files directly from the
> filesystem"). But we used to fallback to a userspace helper when the fw was
> not present and then Takashi made this optional via commit 7b1269f778782d
> titled "firmware: Make user-mode helper optional". Takashi noted in the
> Kconfig "The user-mode helper is no longer required unless you have a
> special firmware file that resides in a non-standard path". It was not
> clarified why that's true though, or what you'd need to do to ensure
> that the fw would be available. It would be good for us to elaborate
> on that.

The recent udev already dropped the firmware loading feature.

Takashi