Hi Hans, On Fri, Oct 04, 2019 at 04:50:52PM +0200, Hans de Goede wrote: > In some cases the platform's main firmware (e.g. the UEFI fw) may contain > an embedded copy of device firmware which needs to be (re)loaded into the > peripheral. Normally such firmware would be part of linux-firmware, but in > some cases this is not feasible, for 2 reasons: > > 1) The firmware is customized for a specific use-case of the chipset / use > with a specific hardware model, so we cannot have a single firmware file > for the chipset. E.g. touchscreen controller firmwares are compiled > specifically for the hardware model they are used with, as they are > calibrated for a specific model digitizer. > > 2) Despite repeated attempts we have failed to get permission to > redistribute the firmware. This is especially a problem with customized > firmwares, these get created by the chip vendor for a specific ODM and the > copyright may partially belong with the ODM, so the chip vendor cannot > give a blanket permission to distribute these. > > This commit adds a new platform fallback mechanism to the firmware loader > which will try to lookup a device fw copy embedded in the platform's main > firmware if direct filesystem lookup fails. > > Drivers which need such embedded fw copies can enable this fallback > mechanism by using the new firmware_request_platform() function. Why would drivers not want to fetch firmware from system firmware if it is not present on disk? I would say let driver to opt-out of this fallback, but default request_firmware() should do it by default. Thanks. -- Dmitry
