Re: [PATCH] media: venus: declare firmware files via MODULE_FIRMWARE

[Christopher Obbard]

Hi Bryan,

On Tue, 2026-04-21 at 02:23 +0100, Bryan O'Donoghue wrote:
> On 20/04/2026 20:57, Christopher Obbard wrote:
> > Hi Bryan,
> > 
> > The background for this was to ensure the firmware is available in a
> > system image
> > or copied into the initrd if the driver is built-in. This is done in a
> > CI environment without
> > access to the hardware.
> > 
> > Debian's initramfs-tools looks at MODULE_FIRWMARE and copies those
> > files into the
> > initrd if the driver is built-in. For now, a workaround for me could
> > be to just manually copy
> > the firmware into the initrd and drop this patch.
> > 
> > I didn't get to the bottom of modifying the firmware loading code to
> > make the driver
> > defer probe to when the rootfs was ready and instead just threw the
> > firmware into
> > the initrd, but that's another story.
> > 
> > On Mon, 20 Apr 2026 at 11:20, Bryan O'Donoghue <bod@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > > 
> > > On 19/04/2026 23:39, Christopher Obbard wrote:
> > > > The driver loads firmware blobs at runtime via request_firmware()
> > > > but does not currently advertise the possible filenames. Add
> > > > MODULE_FIRMWARE() entries for all known firmware variants so they are
> > > > visible via modinfo and can be picked up by user space tooling.
> > > 
> > > What about the board dtsi files ?
> > 
> > I really am not keen on adding all of the firmware from the board dts files as
> > MODULE_FIRMWARE entries into the driver, it then becomes two lists to
> > maintain. What do you think?
> > 
> > BUT talking of two lists to maintain, I am essentially duplicating fwname in
> > MODULE_FIRMWARE, so perhaps my argument is moot.
> > 
> > For my use-case, it may make sense to "teach" the initrd generator to look at
> > the firmware-name entries from the dts files I am building for. But that is also
> > not ideal.
> > 
> > 
> > Cheers!
> > 
> > Chris
> 
> I think its reasonable to keep a list of firmware that is supplied in 
> linux-firmware in the MODULE_FIRMWARE() list.
> 
> AFAIK paths such as "qcom/sdm845/SHIFT/axolotl/venus.mbn"; are not in 
> linux-firmware so .. we shoudln't expect tooling to populate them into 
> initrd.

In latest linux-firmware we have:

$ find -type f | grep -i venus
./qcom/venus-6.0/venus.mbn
./qcom/venus-5.2/venus.mbn
./qcom/venus-1.8/venus.mbn
./qcom/venus-4.2/venus.mbn
./qcom/venus-5.4/venus.mbn

So I wonder if I should send v2 adding MODULE_FIRMWARE entries for just those files in linux-firmware?


Cheers!

Chris