Re: udev breakages - was: Re: Need of an ".async_probe()" type ofcallback at driver's core - Was: Re: [PATCH] [media] drxk: change it to use request_firmware_nowait()

[Lucas De Marchi]

On Tue, Oct 2, 2012 at 7:37 PM, Linus Torvalds
<torvalds@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 2, 2012 at 2:03 PM, Ivan Kalvachev <ikalvachev@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>
>> I'm not kernel developer and probably my opinion would be a little
>> naive, but here it is.
>>
>> Please, make the kernel load firmware from the filesystem on its own.
>
> We probably should do that, not just for firmware, but for modules
> too. It would also simplify the whole "built-in firmware" thing
>
> Afaik, the only thing udev really does is to lok in
> /lib/firmware/updates and /lib/firmware for the file, load it, and
> pass it back to the kernel. We could make the kernel try to do it
> manually first, and only fall back to udev if that fails.
>
> Afaik, nobody ever does anything else anyway.
>
> I'd prefer to not have to do that, but if the udev code is buggy or
> the maintainership is flaky, I guess we don't really have much choice.
>
> Doing the same thing for module loading is probably a good idea too.

humn... I don't think so. It would work perfectly well for firmware,
but for modules there are more things involved like fulfilling
dependencies, soft-dependencies, aliases and the like. It would create
several regressions.

> There were already people (from the google/Android camp) who wanted to
> do module loading based on filename rather than the buffer passed to
> it, because they have a "I trust this filesystem" model.

They wanted to pass a fd instead of a buffer. That is being done in
the new finit_module syscall being discussed:
http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/linux/kernel/1592271?do=post_view_flat


Lucas De Marchi
--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at  http://www.tux.org/lkml/