On Fri, Nov 10, 2017 at 12:26 PM, Luis R. Rodriguez [off-list ref] wrote:

even if you *leave* the flag in place and a driver required
this, but the kernel was compiled without CONFIG_FW_LOADER_USER_HELPER then
calling fw_load_from_user_helper would just already return -ENOENT, as such it
would in turn fallback to direct fs loading so the #ifef'ery seems to be not
needed.

The commit log in no way documents any of the justifications for further
extending use of the usermode helper.

Also, any new functionality introduced should have a respective test
case in tools/testing/selftests/firmware/ and lib/test_firmware.c, as
well as extending existing documentation on
Documentation/driver-api/firmware/.

  Luis