[systemd-devel] udev firmware loading

[Martin Pitt]

Kay Sievers [2013-11-27 12:47 +0100]:
> All of that is gone and will not come back, udev has no idea about
> device firmware and does no longer want to know about it. There is no
> way to tell these days what firmware was requested or loaded, it's all
> happening in the kernel only.
> 
> Unless we want to invent a mechanism to queue up/log that information
> in the kernel and communicate that to userspace, you can just delete
> all the code that handles this in userspace.

Too bad, as all this has already worked in the past. There used to be
a "firmware" subsystem uevent for firmware loading, that should at
least be generated if the kernel cannot load the firmware by itself?
udev itself doesn't need to know about it any more than it needs to
know what to do about a new block device, but one could then continue
to attach services like PackageKit in userspace which can map a
requested firmware to a package to install.

This used to be a way to make more exotic hardware (like DVB-T sticks
or the dreaded Broadcom wifis) "just work".

Martin

-- 
Martin Pitt                        | http://www.piware.de
Ubuntu Developer (www.ubuntu.com)  | Debian Developer  (www.debian.org)