Messages in this thread | | | Date | Tue, 15 Jul 2008 16:42:52 -0700 (PDT) | From | Linus Torvalds <> | Subject | Re: [GIT *] Allow request_firmware() to be satisfied from in-kernel, use it in more drivers. |
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On Tue, 15 Jul 2008, david@lang.hm wrote: > > becouse the tools that wrote the initrd already put the modules in. I don't > maintain those tools, they came with the distro. we're just asking to not > require those tools to be updated immediatly.
But mkinitrd (which is the _only_ thing that people tend to use to write initrd's - is there even anything else) has already been doing this for years, as has been pointed out several times.
This is why I harped on the fact that you already rebuilt your initrd image.
So this really isn't a "updated immediately" issue, afaik. Googling for
mkinitrd MODULE_FIRMWARE
shows a patch from two years ago as the #1 hit in order to make the aic94xx driver work.
Loking down a bit, there's a hotplug discussion from early 2005 (gmane says "3 years, 20 weeks, 3 days, 6 hours and 39 minutes ago" in the header).
Quite frankly, if it's still a problem, there's simply something _wrong_ with the distribution. And yeah, maybe people need to update their kernel building tools.
I already pointed out how the kernel development team quite often says "we will no longer build with gcc-.xyz because it's too old and buggy". The build tools requirements are simply *different* from the runtime tools.
If it's literally just an issue of an mkinitrd that is too damn old, why don't we just make that test at kernel build time. *EXACTLY* the same way we test for compilers that are too old, and refuse to build with them?
(And no, I have no idea which version we should test for. In fact, mkinitrd seems to be singularly hard to test versions for, in that it seems to want the user to be root even just to give the version output. Ooh).
Linus
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