From owner-freebsd-hackers Sat Mar 6 2:24:14 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from peach.ocn.ne.jp (peach.ocn.ne.jp [210.145.254.87]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 24D8515162 for ; Sat, 6 Mar 1999 02:24:11 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from dcs@newsguy.com) Received: from newsguy.com by peach.ocn.ne.jp (8.9.1a/OCN) id TAA03733; Sat, 6 Mar 1999 19:24:05 +0900 (JST) Message-ID: <36E1006E.8F5517CA@newsguy.com> Date: Sat, 06 Mar 1999 19:16:14 +0900 From: "Daniel C. Sobral" X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.5 [en] (Win98; I) X-Accept-Language: pt-BR,ja MIME-Version: 1.0 To: "Matthew N. Dodd" Cc: hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Reading a file inside the kernel. References: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG "Matthew N. Dodd" wrote: > > On Sat, 6 Mar 1999, Daniel C. Sobral wrote: > > Would something like what splash_bmp do be ok with you? It delegates > > to loader the responsibility of loading the file (ie, expects it to be > > loaded already). > > If thats all I've got to work with then it will have to do. Actually, I think there is some way to read a file. I vaguely remember such discussions in the past. But I recall it is very messy. But all I am doing is presenting alternatives. > The file I need to read is a firmware image for a network device that > cannot be attached until the firmware is loaded. > > I would like to use something like splash_bmp to load a config file that > specifys a vendor ID/cookie, an image type, offset, and filename. > > The driver would parse this config file and would load the appropriate > firmware image for each card it detects. > > Due to licensing issues, firmware licensed for use with a particular > vendor card may not be used with cards from a different vendor, though > there is no technical reason why the same image can be used (that I know > of so far.) > > Obviously, I could pre-load all the firmware images available but this > seems wasteful. In addition, I would like the ability to upgrade the > firmware on a card without bringing down the system. While I might make a > device node to pipe the firmware image to the card once the system is up, > giving the driver the ability to request and load the firmware image on > demand would be nicer. You can unload them if you find they are not needed. I can see your point, though. :-) -- Daniel C. Sobral (8-DCS) dcs@newsguy.com dcs@freebsd.org "FreeBSD is Yoda, Linux is Luke Skywalker." To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message