On Wed, 2010-09-29 at 15:34 +0300, Artem Bityutskiy wrote:

On Tue, 2010-09-28 at 18:59 +0100, Ben Hutchings wrote:

quoted

Currently the sfc network driver is optionally combined with an MTD
driver (CONFIG_SFC_MTD) which exposes all upgradable firmware and
configuration partitions in flash.  This works nicely in kernels with
MTD enabled, but since MTD is mainly used in embedded systems with
on-board flash it is often disabled in distribution kernels and custom
kernels alike.  This leaves users of sfc unable to upgrade firmware
without rebuilding the kernel or booting some other distribution.  The
lack of widespread MTD support is a regular cause of support requests.

At least Fedora does have MTD enabled. But I guess commercial
distributions like RHEL might have it disabled (but I did not check),
and I think I could guess the reason for this.

RHEL 4 and 5 have it; the first RHEL 6 beta did not but this was changed
at my request.

Ben.

-- 
Ben Hutchings, Senior Software Engineer, Solarflare Communications
Not speaking for my employer; that's the marketing department's job.
They asked us to note that Solarflare product names are trademarked.