Dan Williams wrote:
The simpler, the better I think; but it's complicated. A sample of
current drivers and when they call request_firmware() from a 2.6.19
kernel:
on dev->open: atmel, prism54, bcm43xx (softmac)
on dev->init: ipw2100, ipw2200
request_firmware is also used during mode changes (ie, BSS to IBSS to
MONITOR)
Perhaps solving the larger problem of "the driver knows something is
horribly wrong, but has no way to tell the user" would be good.
Firmware not being there is bad. There are also periodic failures or
usage conditions that keep things from working. Right now we might have
failures due to:
FIRMWARE missing
RF KILL active
but maybe tomorrow we would have:
Conflict with other active wifi device / coexistence
or any number of solution specific error codes that the vendor / driver
writer would be able to articulate in a text string how to resolve.
Perhaps a simple cfg80211 interface for querying the interface status
and and associated text string (if in an error condition). Missing
firmware or RF kill could have standard numbers and the text string
could be standardized to return just the name of the firmware file expected.
Even if it didn't get standardized across all devices, NM or other
utilities could provide a standard place for the user to look at the
error and then google on it. Right now, things break and the user can't
figure out why without looking at the kernel log (which many users don't
even know exist).
James
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