On Wed, 2008-10-22 at 00:56 -0700, Marcel Holtmann wrote: > Hi Johannes, > > > > I do not believe our request is unreasonable. If a user runs a new > > > kernel the log will print a message that the firmware is incorrect ... > > > all the user needs to do is go to > > > http://intellinuxwireless.org/?n=Downloads and download the latest > > > firmware. > > > > And that exactly _is_ a problem, the user may be relying on wireless > > connectivity. And they won't know up-front they need new firmware. Since > > firmware is loaded from userspace, you're breaking userspace/kernel ABI, > > it's pretty simple really. > > I talked to David Woodhouse and we plan to add a big warning to > modules_install when MODULE_FIRMWARE is not present on the filesystem. Thank you very much. This appears to address the problem. That is, a user trying to run a new kernel with old userspace will now get a warning while internet access is still available. Thus enabling them to update firmware. Is this solution acceptable to everybody? > > > I really don't know why we let you get away with this and bitch > > endlessly when b43 does such a change, to the point where we finally > > cave in and support both versions. Why should a community-supported > > driver be held to higher standards? > > If in any way possible, we should support both versions of the firmware. I would like to hear some suggestions on how we can do this as I am not familiar with the other drivers. The driver is closely tied to the firmware ... and I am actually tempted to draw an analogy between the interface between the driver and mac80211 here. From what I understand, for the driver to support many versions of the firmware it dynamically needs to detect which features are supported at runtime and act accordingly. This is a hard problem. What am I missing? Reinette -- 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
