Prashant Malani [off-list ref] 

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(Adding a few more Realtek folks)

Friendly ping. Any thoughts / feedback, Realtek folks (and others) ?

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On Thu, Aug 29, 2019 at 11:40 AM Prashant Malani

[off-list ref] wrote:

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Hi,

The r8152 driver source code distributed by Realtek (on
www.realtek.com) contains firmware patches. This involves binary
byte-arrays being written byte/word-wise to the hardware memory
Example: grundler@chromium.org (cc-ed) has an experimental patch

which

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includes the firmware patching code which was distributed with the
Realtek source :

https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/c/chromiumos/third_party/kernel
/+/1417953

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It would be nice to have a way to incorporate these firmware fixes
into the upstream code. Since having indecipherable byte-arrays is not
possible upstream, I propose the following:
- We use the assistance of Realtek to come up with a format which the
firmware patch files can follow (this can be documented in the
comments).
      - A real simple format could look like this:
              +

<section1><size_in_bytes><address1><data1><address2><data2>...<addressN

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<dataN><section2>...

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               + The driver would be able to understand how to parse
each section (e.g is each data entry a byte or a word?)

- We use request_firmware() to load the firmware, parse it and write
the data to the relevant registers.

I plan to finish the patches which I am going to submit, first. Then,
I could focus on this. However, I don't think I would start this
quickly. There are many preparations and they would take me a lot of
time.

Best Regards,
Hayes