[Bug 40952] R100 firmware no longer loads

[Dave Airlie]

> --- Comment #10 from Linus Torvalds <torvalds at linux-foundation.org>  2011-08-25 22:43:53 ---
> On Thu, Aug 25, 2011 at 2:25 PM,  <bugzilla-daemon at bugzilla.kernel.org> wrote:
>>
>> Interestingly, the RS780 managed to load its firmware (also all compiled into
>> the kernel) even w/o this patch.
>
> Does the R600+ driver perhaps load firmware only at open time?
>
> The problem with the r100 driver is that it loads firmware very early
> on, at driver init time. Generally it's *much* better if you request
> the firmware when the device is actually opened, rather than when the
> driver loads.

That doesn't make any sense for radeon graphics drivers, since the
firmware is required to initialise the engines on the GPU, which you
really want to do so you can turn on the screen and stuff.

Dave.