On Fri, 14 Oct 2005, Christoph Hellwig wrote: > On Thu, Oct 13, 2005 at 04:16:24PM -0700, Andrew Vasquez wrote: > > Signed-off-by: Andrew Vasquez <andrew.vasquez@xxxxxxxxxx> > > NACK. No more embedded firmware. Unfortunately, since OLS, it has been decided that for 24xx HBAs, firmware will *not* be present on the board during manufacturing time and thus, similarly to all our previous products, firmware will have to be embedded within the driver. Yes, this is a complete 180 from my previous statements before and during OLS. The additional patch: [PATCH 7/12] qla2xxx: Add hotplug firmware-load support for all ISP types. http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-scsi&m=112924541603555&w=2 as part of this patchset moves us one-step closer to having complete firmware-blob independence (and hell, perhaps some final resolution wrt this whole licensing issue) from the driver, but it is certainly not a panacea. There is still the major issue of those users who depend on a root-boot across the SAN. As it currently stands, I don't believe distros are currently at a state where the request-firmware interface is fully supported at boot-time (please correct me if I'm wrong). There's also an additional detail I'm trying to work out locally -- distribution of these .bin files, this is entirely within my court, but as it stands, without an firmware image present, these 24xx users will have no way of initialising their cards. I believe we spoke about this during OLS as well, and agreed that adding the request-firmware interface for all ISP types, waiting a year or so for distro infrastructure to mature now, then discarding the embedded blobs was the way to go. Given that, embedded 24xx support will need to be present throughout that year. -- Andrew - : send the line "unsubscribe linux-scsi" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
