Sergey Vlasov wrote: > On Wed, Jun 21, 2006 at 08:56:52AM +0100, James Courtier-Dutton wrote: > >> For (1), the FPGA array is filled with 78756 bytes of netlist code. >> I suppose one could consider this 78756 bytes as firmware. >> Should this firmware sit somewhere in userspace? >> > > Probably must, due to license issues :( > Fortunately, licensing is not an issue. They donated the emu1212m card to me. I have a signed agreement with them that I can write source code for the creative sound cards and publish them as GPL. I just can't publish or pass on any documents they might have sent me to help me in that task. > >> The trouble is, that if one changes some controls on the device, e.g. >> switching from SPDIF to ADAT digital outputs, a whole new different >> firmware image is loaded. So, one has multiple different firmware >> images, with one swapping between them. Should these firmware images be >> left in the kernel then, instead of using the userspace firmware api? >> > > There are some drivers in the kernel which load different firmware images > in different modes. E.g., the ipw2200 driver can load ipw2200-bss.fw, > ipw2200-ibss.fw or ipw2200-sniffer.fw depending on the mode set by > iwconfig (and can switch between them at runtime). > > There is also an option to use a single firmware file consisting of > multiple parts used for different modes, but this obviously has a higher > memory overhead. IMHO this should be used only when there are some > latency restrictions for switching modes (so that a driver can request all > firmware parts during initialization and then load different parts without > waiting for userspace helpers). > Are all those threee fw images loaded into the driver cache memory from userspace at modprobe time, or is each one loaded from userspace each time a iwconfig mode changes? I don't yet know how many different images I will have to play with. I have so far counted the presence of 2. Is leaving them cached in driver kernel memory considered bad practice, and wasteful of memory space? James _______________________________________________ Alsa-devel mailing list Alsa-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/alsa-devel
