quoted

So the current state is that drivers/atm contains the C dump of fore 200 
firmware in drivers/atm/fore200e_pca_fw.c but this firmware is not built 
and not installed by make install. It's also not present in 
linux-firware tree/packages so the fore driver can not load its firmware 
from anywhere. I guess this is not the intended outcome.

this firmware is in the linux-atm source tree now.  the 2.5.1 release
should have the firmware.

2.5.1 does not seem to contain the firmware.

Even if it will be there in the next release, we should still do 
something to distribute it to the user so that any modern distro has the 
firmware available (in linux-firmware or via similar means) so the user 
does not have to redo the detective work I am doing. Packaging it along 
with linux-atm packages (atm-tools in Debian) does not seem correct, so 
do we need to make a special firmware package out of it or just add to 
some other firmware repo that is packaged already?

What's the licence of the firmware anyway - unknown likely?

And we can probably remove drivers/atm/fore200e_pca_fw.c if we 
distribute the firmware out of kernel tree.

-- 
Meelis Roos (mroos@linux.ee)