Firmware

[Don Zickus]

On Mon, Jun 09, 2008 at 11:04:08AM +0100, David Woodhouse wrote:
> Been playing with how I'd make the kernel package deal with the new
> 'make firmware_install' stuff. Currently looks something like this.

Is that something new upstream?  It would be great to separate the
firmware from the kernel builds.

> 
> I suspect that (for now) we should make the kernel binary packages
> depend on kernel-firmware?
> 
> Should the package own the /lib/firmware/ directory?
> 
> Ideally we'll want kernel-firmware to be a .noarch.rpm, but we can't get
> that until we start to build it from a separate srpm.

I assume the %install would cause a rebuild of the initrd to deal with
storage device firmware on bootup?

We were trying to do this with RHEL (jcm was working on this).  One of the
issues I brought up (which no one had a solution for) was the case for a
bad firmware for storage devices.  Currently they are built into the
kernel.  So if you stumble upon bad firmware, you just boot the previous
working kernel.  How would this be handled with everything under
/lib/firmware?  I guess a previously working initrd image might suffice.

Cheers,
Don