On Thu, Dec 07, 2006 at 04:02:06PM +0530, Rick Brown wrote: > Hi list, > > Please pardon me for posting some what off the topic question here. > > I read that the driver has the reponsibility to download firmware onto > a device. My understanding of "firmware" is that it is the code that > runs IN the device without any help from the host (Hence there needs > to be a processing core in the device). > > So as per this, a firmware is ONLY applicable to devices which are > actually SoC (System on chip)?? I shall share whatever I know and I do not know much. :) Firmware is software that runs on the device. But usually firmware is downloaded as devices like FPGA can be made to behave as a variety of hardware devices by downloading the appropriate code. Now is this "appropriate code" called firmware or not I am not sure, I think it is called microcode. Firmware I guess is some sort of OS like thingy that drives the device. So the point is most cheapo hardware and nearly all commodity devices that need firmware to run on them need the assistance of someone else, typically host. Sometimes it is also downloaded by TFTP as is the case with Cisco IP phones and stuff. Now, it is udev's job to download firmware into the device. It detects the plug in event (say USB) and uses helper scripts to download the firmware. I guess once the firmware is executing, then the driver takes over. I could be wrong here but most of it is correct TTBOMK. regards, Girish -- Kernelnewbies: Help each other learn about the Linux kernel. Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/kernelnewbies/ FAQ: http://kernelnewbies.org/faq/
