Re: loading firmware while usermodehelper disabled.

Alan Cox [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

So we have a table of USB ids that list the devices that need

firmware drivers. When the uvcvideo driver registers the firmware
interface with a USB id that matches the list we load the firmware
driver and pass it a "warm start" event so it can cache the firmware.

quoted

As long as we can identify the devices that *might* need firmware

then we are ok.

You just broke the module loading guarantees that stop it all coming
apart
in the first place. Probably not in many real world ways but not good.

If we warm booted from Windows into Linux and then suspended then on
resume we won't have the driver for the firmware loaded present - we
never saw the 'need firmware' id.

I agree we won't see the need firmware id but we should still be able to identify the device from some of its ids shouldn't we? We could then cache the firmware even though we never loaded it.

That moves us from a dependancy chain for firmware to one including
firmware and modules (imagine /lib/modules over iscsi for an iscsi
adapter needing firmware).

At the moment I don't think anyone has been dumb enough to do firmware
requiring storage and NFS root over firmware requiring USB devices is
pretty dumb. I don't however think it's a good hole to dig ?

I'm sure someone will try it at somepoint...

Thanks,

Jack

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