Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1756757AbYGOXob (ORCPT ); Tue, 15 Jul 2008 19:44:31 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1753134AbYGOXoW (ORCPT ); Tue, 15 Jul 2008 19:44:22 -0400 Received: from smtp1.linux-foundation.org ([140.211.169.13]:51302 "EHLO smtp1.linux-foundation.org" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1752189AbYGOXoV (ORCPT ); Tue, 15 Jul 2008 19:44:21 -0400 Date: Tue, 15 Jul 2008 16:42:52 -0700 (PDT) From: Linus Torvalds To: david@lang.hm cc: Marcel Holtmann , David Woodhouse , Frans Pop , jeff@garzik.org, arjan@infradead.org, akpm@linux-foundation.org, alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: [GIT *] Allow request_firmware() to be satisfied from in-kernel, use it in more drivers. In-Reply-To: Message-ID: References: <1216077806.27455.85.camel@shinybook.infradead.org> <20080714164119.99c33d5b.akpm@linux-foundation.org> <20080714165956.7fe2d4ee@infradead.org> <487C0365.5030203@garzik.org> <487C0365.5030203@garzik.org> <200807151757.10626.elendil@planet.nl> <1216149637.27242.65.camel@violet.holtmann.net> <1216150616.27455.377.camel@shinybook.infradead.org> <1216151640.27242.90.camel@violet.holtmann.net> User-Agent: Alpine 1.10 (LFD 962 2008-03-14) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1948 Lines: 49 On Tue, 15 Jul 2008, david@lang.hm wrote: > > becouse the tools that wrote the initrd already put the modules in. I don't > maintain those tools, they came with the distro. we're just asking to not > require those tools to be updated immediatly. But mkinitrd (which is the _only_ thing that people tend to use to write initrd's - is there even anything else) has already been doing this for years, as has been pointed out several times. This is why I harped on the fact that you already rebuilt your initrd image. So this really isn't a "updated immediately" issue, afaik. Googling for mkinitrd MODULE_FIRMWARE shows a patch from two years ago as the #1 hit in order to make the aic94xx driver work. Loking down a bit, there's a hotplug discussion from early 2005 (gmane says "3 years, 20 weeks, 3 days, 6 hours and 39 minutes ago" in the header). Quite frankly, if it's still a problem, there's simply something _wrong_ with the distribution. And yeah, maybe people need to update their kernel building tools. I already pointed out how the kernel development team quite often says "we will no longer build with gcc-.xyz because it's too old and buggy". The build tools requirements are simply *different* from the runtime tools. If it's literally just an issue of an mkinitrd that is too damn old, why don't we just make that test at kernel build time. *EXACTLY* the same way we test for compilers that are too old, and refuse to build with them? (And no, I have no idea which version we should test for. In fact, mkinitrd seems to be singularly hard to test versions for, in that it seems to want the user to be root even just to give the version output. Ooh). Linus -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/