[systemd-devel] udev firmware loading

[Colin Guthrie]

'Twas brillig, and Richard Hughes at 27/11/13 09:31 did gyre and
gimble:> Hi all,
>
> I've been porting a lot of the gnome-packagekit functionality to
> gnome-software these last few months. One thing that used to work
> well, but I've not seen a bugreport about in *years* is the
> install-package-for-missing-firmware thing.
>
> IIRC, udev used to call /lib/udev/firmware.sh which used to create a
> file in /var/run/PackageKit/udev with the missing firmware file name.
> I can't see any reference to this in udev-builtin-firmware and
> wondered if this was removed deliberately.

AFAIUI, the kernel loads firmware directly these days.

Unless you explicitly tell it, udev will not even compile the
src/udev/udev-builtin-firmware.c file.

There is also config on the kernel side too, so it really depends on how
things are shipped I guess. That said, there is no mention of
firmware.sh anywhere so not sure that even if you did compile things
with appropriate support whether or not you'd actually have that script run.

> If installing-a-package-for-missing-firmware is something you don't
> want to support any more, that's fine, just let me know and I can
> delete a ton of code in PackageKit and gnome-packagekit. It was a
> little-used feature, but a nice bit of polish that made more hardware
> work out-of-the-box.

Not sure if some other mechanism could be used, but I'm sure people here
could elaborate.

> The "always install all firmware files, they are tiny" argument works
> for me as well, so don't be afraid of using that defence. :)

WFM ;)

Col

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Colin Guthrie
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