Hi, Mentors! I'm helping out Nicolas Boullis with the em8300 packages. This is an out-of-tree kernel module and utilities to make use of Creative DXR3 and Sigma Designs Hollywood+ DVD decoders cards. I've been discussing with Nicolas various things about the packages while trying to make a package for the latest version of upstream, and he recommended I ask for opinions.
The package sources for what I have done so far, based on Nicolas' previous work, can be found at: http://tachyon.no-ip.org/em8300/em8300_0.15.2.dfsg-1.diff.gz http://tachyon.no-ip.org/em8300/em8300_0.15.2.dfsg-1.dsc http://tachyon.no-ip.org/em8300/em8300_0.15.2.dfsg.orig.tar.gz There are a couple of things that concern us. The first involves device files. em8300 has no entry in MAKEDEV, and Nicolas has found requests go unanswered, so in the meantime using mknod in a postinst is our only option. I realise it's against policy, but what else can we do? Of course, using mknod is unnecessary when udev or devfs is running. Currently the postinst checks to make sure update-devfsd and udevd don't exist before making nodes, but this probably isn't a very good solution. Any ideas for improvements? Also, how should the module image, when eventually built, depend on the kernel image? Should it be a depends, recommends, or suggests? Should it be there at all? If it should have some kind of dependency, should it be to a strict version? And what about the KSTEM, kernel/linux? make-kpkg exports the stem variable but module-assistant doesn't. My current solution is to use the same logic as m-a uses to work it out, ie duplicating code. Alternatively, should it always be "linux" from now on? Then there is the problem of the firmware. em8300 uses a non-free firmware which is downloaded from the upstream site (hence contrib). Previously this firmware was installed into /usr/share/em8300 and loaded into the chip by a modprobe.d command running the em8300setup program. Now that the kernel, sometimes, has automatic firmware loading support from /lib/firmware, which upstream now supports, this leaves us in a bit of a puzzle. Installing the firmware to /lib/firmware is easy enough. The hard part is determining if the modprobe.d stuff is necessary. Related, bug #341313 seems to be caused by /usr not being available on boot when the firmware is being loaded by the modprobe.d line. This would only be half-solved by moving the firmware from /usr to /lib since /usr/bin/em8300setup is still required. This problem would go away if that trickery in modprobe.d was unnecessary, but I'm not convinced that's the case. A problem with using /lib is that changing firmwares would be a little more effort, but I don't believe this will be a problem. Opinions? Ideas? Peace, Brendon
