Re: loading firmware while usermodehelper disabled.

On Sun, 1 Jan 2012 20:39:45 +0000

Alan Cox [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

When you suspend the power gets killed so the device loses its firmware
and goes back to being a firmware requesting thing on resume.

Worse still - you don't easily know if the device is in fact new and was
added while suspended, or was always there.

So for those devices you do need to load the firmware into them
automatically after the resume to work out what they are and get the MAC
to see if its the same wireless card or not.

Well, that does not prevent you from caching the firmware once you
got it from userspace and keep it until module unload (or probably device
close), so that it is already available on resume.

That's actually wrong. If you cached every single firmware, the kernel would 
gulp down a lot of space that can't be swapped out!

M