[systemd-devel] udev firmware loading

[Tom Gundersen]

On Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 12:53 PM, Martin Pitt <martin.pitt at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> 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".

Couldn't the kernel simply log (one of these new fance structured log
messages it now supports) whenever it fails to load a piece of
firmware?

-t