Wednesday, December 18, 2013, 10:26:25 AM, you wrote: > Hi all, > We really should be asking Luis to look at this who hasn't yet chimed > in, presumably because he's between jobs (and travelling IIRC) > On Wed, 2013-12-18 at 10:16 +0100, Arend van Spriel wrote: >> On 12/17/2013 11:06 PM, Linus Torvalds wrote: >> > We have literally had this *exact* same issue with firmware loading. >> > Network drivers shouldn't try to load firmware at module load time. >> > Same deal. >> >> It is kind of a chicken and egg problem for (wireless) networking >> drivers. To get IFF_UP from the network layer you have to register a >> netdevice. For wireless drivers this means you have to register a wiphy >> device with cfg80211 which flags capabilities and optionally are custom >> regulatory domain. That information depends on the device and firmware >> used. And there we have a full circle. > This is all really beside the point. > For this CRDA information, the kernel never actually *waits* for it, so > in the case that there's no reply, it uses the built-in world domain. So > it's not like request_firmware(), which will block boot forever, but > it's also not like request_firmware_nowait() which will eventually time > out and come back with an error if userspace isn't handling it (though > now that firmware loading is built in ...) > The issue is that it uses the built-in data *forever*, and what Sander > said was "or it will block forever" but just meant that it never was > able to do any further updates. > It *doesn't* actually block the boot process or such. Everything Linus > said is true but seems to have been written in understanding "blocks" as > "blocking the boot process", rather than "blocking further updates". > Regardless of this, even blocking further updates is a really bad idea. > There are a few ways to handle this, but I'll let Luis poke at that. Your description is correct, sorry if I was not clear. -- Sander > johannes -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-wireless" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
