Look at the device nodes. The kernel has mouse0 for example and udev
will translate this into /dev/input/mouse0. Nobody expects the kernel
to use input/mouse0 and actually you even can't do that at all since
the device model forbids "/" as bus id. Same applies for the firmware
filenames.
No, it doesn't.
Also at some point we might change the actual implementation of
request_firmware() to allow running multiple request_firmware() at the
same time to improve the init time of devices (if that makes sense).
In that case the filename would become a kobject and then the
directory separator would become illegal.
There's no need to think of it that way. Look at a uevent now:
UEVENT[1211722721.323011] add /devices/pci0001:10/0001:10:12.0/ ssb0:0/firmware/ssb0:0 (firmware)
ACTION=add
DEVPATH=/devices/pci0001:10/0001:10:12.0/ssb0:0/firmware/ssb0:0
SUBSYSTEM=firmware
FIRMWARE=b43/b0g0bsinitvals5.fw
TIMEOUT=60
SEQNUM=1376
The "firmware key" is contained in the FIRMWARE environment variable. If
you want to allow loading multiple firmwares at the same time, you
wouldn't have to make the key part of the device name, you would only
have to add a unique ID to the firmware device name, say