On Fri, Oct 14, 2005 at 09:50:35AM -0700, Andrew Vasquez wrote: > 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. No, we shouldn't add more firmware. I think we need to play out you against the distros here so that they finally fix their infrastructure ;-) - : 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
