[ewg] shipping firmware with ofed

[Steve Wise]

> I asked around, and we've never actually shipped Chelsio firmware (we
> almost did, but instead Chelsio added the firmware byte code into their
> upstream driver and we backported that so that the kernel has the
> firmware built into the Chelsio driver).  We have shipped other firmware
> rpms in the past.  Those rpms have to be built separate from regular
> source based rpms (or else the aggregation aspect of the GPL and most
> other licenses kicks in), so for instance you couldn't stick a binary
> firmware blob in the libcxgb3 rpm along side it's library source.  We've
> also traditionally shipped any firmware packages on a separate CD/DVD
> from our main distribution where we had certain closed source but free
> to distribute items (like Adobe Reader/Flash Player, that sort of
> thing).  And I don't think the firmware rpms are in the base channel in
> RHN but instead require you to subscribe to the addons channel in RHN
> (but I could be wrong on that, I don't keep up with RHN channel
> assignments myself).
>
> So, our preference is actually to have the right firmware be part of the
> driver itself.  That's what cxgb3 does now, it's what QLogic FC adapters
> have done since forever, as well as quite a few other drivers, and it
> makes sure the driver and firmware *never* get out of sync.  It also
> means that a kernel upgrade doesn't trigger a firmware upgrade on the
> file system which can render the previous kernel unusable.
>
>   

I'm sorry everyone.  I mis-spoke here.  I thought Chelsio shipped the 
binary fw image somehow with RHEL5.3.  Turns out they do in fact bundle 
it in a header file upstream. This is new news to me. :)

>From Chelsio:

drivers/net/cxgb3/t3_firmware.h contains the FW and the protocol sram
images. The driver is modified to first try to load images under
/lib/firmware, then from the header file.


Guess I'll see about adding these driver changes into ofed.

Steve.