Date: Sat, 06 Mar 1999 18:04:57 -0800 From: Mike Smith <mike@smith.net.au> To: "Matthew N. Dodd" <winter@jurai.net> Cc: "Daniel C. Sobral" <dcs@newsguy.com>, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Reading a file inside the kernel. Message-ID: <199903070204.SAA00994@dingo.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Fri, 05 Mar 1999 22:05:42 EST." <Pine.BSF.4.02.9903052200080.15262-100000@sasami.jurai.net>
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> 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. Of course it's not all you have to work with; it's quite easy to read files inside the kernel. See eg. the new module code or the gzip image activator. > 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. I guess it depends on how the device might be used; myself I would actually almost be inclined to write the probe/download code in BootForth so that the adapter could be used to netboot the system. Failing that, it would make definite sense to demand-load the firmware as required, yes. -- \\ Sometimes you're ahead, \\ Mike Smith \\ sometimes you're behind. \\ mike@smith.net.au \\ The race is long, and in the \\ msmith@freebsd.org \\ end it's only with yourself. \\ msmith@cdrom.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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