Hi Roman, glad to see you're still alive! On Wednesday 2 November 2005 11:46, Roman Kagan wrote: > On Tue, Nov 01, 2005 at 01:04:02PM +0000, David Woodhouse wrote: > > On Tue, 2005-11-01 at 13:40 +0100, Duncan Sands wrote: > > > this code looks like a 'orrible hack to work around a common problem > > > with USB modem's of this type: if the modem is plugged in while the > > > system boots, the driver may look for firmware before the filesystem > > > holding the firmware is mounted; I guess the delay usually gives > > > the filesystem enough time to be mounted. I'm told that the correct > > > solution is to stick the firmware in an initramfs as well. > > > > Why can't we request the firmware again when the device is first used, > > if it wasn't present when the driver was first loaded? > > Because the firmware loading can take long, and apps may legitimately > give up opening the device after a timeout. > > Besides, it doesn't look logical. An uninitialized device is not > particularly useful for anything but initialization. You don't create, > say, a network device for your ethernet card until you're finished with > its PCI setup, do you? > > I think the async firmware loading can do the job nicely, in a generic > manner. BTW the usbatm drivers do it already (wasn't it you who > implemented it? :), long before request_firmware_nowait() was available. > So it's only a matter of tools adjusting, which seems to be going on.
I can't help feeling that it is wrong to add ad-hoc code to drivers (such as: if the firmware wasn't there, try to load it again later) in an attempt to work around what is, in the end, a userspace configuration problem. The fact that configuring userspace correctly seems to be tricky is sad, but not the driver's problem. I don't mind using request_firmware_nowait by the way. The lack of a timeout is no problem as long as we make it possible for the user to shoot the firmware loading down by sending a signal. Ciao, Duncan. PS: On the other hand, users are feeling the pain, which means I get to feel their pain, which tempts me to hack in a workaround ;) ------------------------------------------------------- SF.Net email is sponsored by: Tame your development challenges with Apache's Geronimo App Server. Download it for free - -and be entered to win a 42" plasma tv or your very own Sony(tm)PSP. Click here to play: http://sourceforge.net/geronimo.php _______________________________________________ linux-usb-devel@lists.sourceforge.net To unsubscribe, use the last form field at: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/linux-usb-devel