Kay, thanks for the reports. Drivers should definitely be loading firmware at IFF_UP time. John On Sat, Jan 14, 2012 at 04:25:23PM +0100, Kay Sievers wrote: > Hey, > > just a heads-up, when bug reports are coming in now. The kernel log > might look like a kernel failure, but it's caused by recent userspace > changes. > > We changed udev to strictly enforce sequence order and dependency > handling of events. This seems to break some netdev drivers which > block in modprobe until the firmware from userspace is loaded into the > driver. > > I think it's out of question, that nothing must block in module init > and rely on a userspace transaction to be fulfilled to finish the > init_module() syscall. If userspace is not running properly, nothing > will work. Built-in drivers and the transition from initramfs to the > real root can't be handled properly that way. > > These drivers need to be fixed to load their firmware during ifup, > which would be the most flexible solution. That way, it should also > work if the driver is built-in, or is loaded from initramfs and no > firmware is available. > Alternatively, the firmware request should be able to use the aync > firmware_request API and not the blocking one. > > We might need to work around that in the current udev for now, but > these drivers will definitely break in future udev versions. > Userspace, these days, should not be in charge of papering over > obvious kernel bugs like this. > > These are the drivers we received bug reports so far. We didn't look > into any of details of the drivers, but according to the logs, they > seem to block for 60 seconds in modprobe, when userspace is not > behaving like expected: > bnx2/bnx2-mips-06-6.2.1.fw > rtlwifi/rtl8192sefw.bin > brcm/bcm43xx-0.fw > > Any help here would be appreciated. > > Thanks, > Kay > -- > To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe netdev" in > the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx > More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html > -- John W. Linville Someday the world will need a hero, and you linville@xxxxxxxxxxxxx might be all we have. Be ready. -- 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
