Kay,

These drivers need to be fixed to load their firmware during ifup,
which would be the most flexible solution. That way, it should also
work if the driver is built-in, or is loaded from initramfs and no
firmware is available.
Alternatively, the firmware request should be able to use the aync
firmware_request API and not the blocking one.

Will udev now also return the async load only after root is booted if it
can't be satisfied earlier? There are a number of devices, particularly
wireless, that need firmware before they can register with mac80211 for
capability advertisement reasons.

johannes