Subject: Re: [GIT *] Allow request_firmware() to be satisfied
	from	in-kernel, use it in more drivers.
From: David Woodhouse <dwmw2@infradead.org>
To: david@lang.hm
Cc: Arjan van de Ven <arjan@infradead.org>, David Miller <davem@davemloft.net>,
       torvalds@linux-foundation.org, rene.herman@keyaccess.nl,
       akpm@linux-foundation.org, alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk,
       linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
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Date: Mon, 14 Jul 2008 23:03:15 -0700
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On Mon, 2008-07-14 at 22:45 -0700, david@lang.hm wrote:
> linus pointed out that the documentation reccomended the
> request_firmware();load_firmware();release() approach and stated that that 
> approach was the wrong way to do things, instead doing a request_firmware 
> early and release when the module is unloaded.
> 
> does this patch series follow the documented reccomendation? or does it 
> follow the more concervative approach Linus pointed out? (it's far faster 
> to ask then to search Internet archives for the patches)

Mostly it follows the documented recommendation, since most of the
touched drivers are USB drivers and you end up re-enumerating and
starting from scratch on resume anyway. And the remainder are so old
that they don't have suspend/resume support anyway. Remember, we're only
really updating the older drivers; newer drivers tend to use
request_firmware() already, and have done for years.

The only one I remember offhand that loads the firmware and keeps it
around is tg3 -- and I didn't ask Linus to pull that one. In fact, we
only did it that way for tg3 since that driver seems to doing _all_ its
chip reset and firmware reload (including a boatload of udelays) within
a spinlock. That in itself is probably not optimal, but it wasn't really
within the scope of what we were doing to fix it.

-- 
dwmw2

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