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Date: Mon, 06 Nov 2000 13:37:39 -0500
From: Jeff Garzik <jgarzik@mandrakesoft.com>
Organization: MandrakeSoft
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To: Oliver Xymoron <oxymoron@waste.org>
CC: David Woodhouse <dwmw2@infradead.org>, Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>,
        Keith Owens <kaos@ocs.com.au>,
        linux-kernel <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: Persistent module storage [was Linux 2.4 Status / TODO page]
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Oliver Xymoron wrote:
> 
> On Mon, 6 Nov 2000, David Woodhouse wrote:
> 
> > The point here is that although I've put up with just keeping the sound
> > driver loaded for the last few years, permanently taking up a large amount
> > of DMA memory, the inter_module_xxx stuff that Keith is proposing would
> > give us a simple way of storing the data which we want to store.
> ...
> > Being able to do it completely in userspace would be neater, though.
> 
> I think there are a bunch of other devices that need stuff from userspace
> before they fully init, namely the ones that load proprietary firmware
> images. Will an approach like that work here?

Some devices have a firmware.h that is compiled into the driver.  A few
sound devices use a function that loads a firmware file from userspace,
given a filename.  The comment in drivers/sound/sound_firmware.c says
that this is a poor method, and that the recommended method for
uploading firmware to a device is via ioctl.

	Jeff


-- 
Jeff Garzik             | "When I do this, my computer freezes."
Building 1024           |          -user
MandrakeSoft            | "Don't do that."
                        |          -level 1
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