Re: [RFC] p54: software hot-swap eeprom image

On Fri, Nov 20, 2009 at 11:53 AM, Dan Williams [off-list ref] wrote:

On Fri, 2009-11-20 at 20:27 +0100, Christian Lamparter wrote:

quoted

This (aggregated) patch adds a new sysfs file "eeprom_overwrite"
which can be used to upload an customized eeprom image to the
driver during normal operation.

The old wlanX device will quickly vanish. And if the new EEPROM
image passes all sanity checks the device will reappear.

Hopefully, this proves to be an adequate solution for everyone
with a bad/missing EEPROM data/chip.

Honestly I wonder if this would be better done with ethtool.  There's
already ethtool --eeprom-dump, would it be so hard to do an ethtool
--eeprom-load ?

I can see a number of devices doing this, so in my mind it makes sense
to have a generic facility for this sort of thing.  But then again it's
not so common an operation and its fraught with danger :)  Libertas
could potentially use this, but libertas has *two* EEPROM images that it
might need to update.  So if ethtool did grow --eeprom-load we may want
to account for more than one eeprom image.

What do people think?

Can't request_firmware() be generalized for this sort of stuff too?

  Luis
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