Messages in this thread | ![/](/images/icornerl.gif) | | Date | Wed, 26 Mar 2003 17:38:57 -0800 | From | Max Krasnyansky <> | Subject | Re: Preferred way to load non-free firmware |
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At 05:32 PM 3/25/2003, Pavel Roskin wrote: >Hello! > >I'm writing a Linux device driver for a device that requires non-free >firmware in order to function. The firmware can be easily extracted from >the Windows driver for that device. The device is a PCMCIA wireless card. > >The firmware is about 60k in size, and it mostly consists of executable >code for ARM processor. Reimplementing it is out of question for me. > >What would be the best approach to handle this situation: > >1) Register a file on procfs and use "cat" to load the firmware into the >kernel. > >2) Register a device for the same purpose. > >3) Register a device, but use ioctl(). > >4) Open a network socket and use ioctl() on it (like ifconfig does). > >5) Use one of the the above ways to send the filename to the module and >let the module load the firmware from file using do_generic_file_read(). > >6) Provide a script to wrap firmware into a module and load it using >modprobe. > >7) Encode the firmware into a header file, add it to the driver and >pretend that the copyright issue doesn't exist (like it's done in the >Keyspan USB driver). > >Better ideas?
8) Have the driver call external user-space firmware loader that uses either iopl/outb/inb or mmap(/dev/mem) and loads firmware directly.
Max
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