Re: [RFC v2 3/7] firmware: port built-in section to linker table

[Luis R. Rodriguez]

On Tue, Mar 1, 2016 at 9:54 AM, Luis R. Rodriguez <mcgrof@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 01, 2016 at 08:10:24AM -0800, James Bottomley wrote:
>> On Mon, 2016-02-29 at 10:12 +0000, David Woodhouse wrote:
>> > On Fri, 2016-02-19 at 05:45 -0800, Luis R. Rodriguez wrote:
>> > > This ports built-in firmware to use linker tables,
>> > > this replaces the custom section solution with a
>> > > generic solution.
>> > >
>> > > This also demos the use of the .rodata (SECTION_RO)
>> > > linker tables.
>> > >
>> > > Tested with 0 built-in firmware, 1 and 2 built-in
>> > > firmwares successfully.
>> >
>> > I think we'd do better to rip this support out entirely. It just
>> > isn't needed; firmware can live in an initramfs and don't even need
>> > *any* actual running userspace support to load it from there these
>> > days, do we?
>>
>> We have lots of SCSI drivers with built in firmware.  The obvious
>> examples are 53c700, aic7xxx and aic79xx.  For them, we actually have
>> the firmware compilers in tree.  The firmware model they use just isn't
>> amenable to the firmware loader: they're not monolithic blobs, it's a
>> set of firmware scripts we use to handle particular operations before
>> giving control back to the host, so the firmware and the driver are
>> very much symbiotic.
>
> I'm in the process of doing some other cleanups with the firmware_class
> stuff so that odd requirements get supported but clean interfaces are
> also not hampered by these odd requirements, so I'll take a look at
> this later. If you have other oddball firmware requirements please
> let me know so I can also keep in mind.
>
>> On the other hand, I don't think any of them uses firmware sections, so
>> it's not an argument for not ripping out this type.
>
> Thanks for confirming. I'll rip this out.

Just a heads up, I've put the removal through 0-day without issues,
I'll be folding the removal into another series of changes for the
firmware API which should help compartmentalize the user mode helper
stuff as well.

 Luis