[ewg] Request to pull the firmware in OFED tree from kernel.org

[Steve Wise]

On 10/24/2012 6:31 AM, Vipul Pandya wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> As many of us might be aware that kernel.org maintains a separate repo for the adapter firmware. Chelsio keeps updating its latest firmware to this repo. For our T3 and T4 adapter's robust functionality and for ease of use for the customer, we would like to request OFED maintainers to update OFED package with kernel.org's firmware repository.
>
> Latest RHEL distros already follows this practice. i.e. they take the firmwares from the Linux's http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/dwmw2/linux-firmware.git;a=summary repo and embeds them in their RPMs. Thus when RHEL distro gets installed firmware binary gets copied in the fixed location. For example on RHEL 6.3 distro Chelsio's T4 firmware binary gets copied to /lib/firmware/cxgb4/t4fw.bin location when kernel-firmware-2.6.32-279.el6.noarch rpm gets installed. Then when our driver gets loaded it checks this fixed location and if there is a newer firmware present there then driver will load that firmware on the adapter. We would like similar mechanism in OFED package as well. Right now customer has to manually copy the latest firmware to /lib/firmware/cxgb4/ directory in order to upgrade the firmware.
>
> We would like to request this to happen with OFED-3.5 GA. Please let us know your views.
>
> Thanks,
> Vipul Pandya

OFED should provide this.  For the cxgb3 OFED driver, we bound the 
firmware into a header file included in the cxgb3 driver.  But going 
forward, I think we should model OFED like other distros and simply 
create an rpm for firmware.  We could have a single rpm, or one per 
device, but I prefer a single kernel-firmware rpm ala RHEL.


Steve.