netdev - Re: 2.6.28-git8: tg3 doesn't work due to firmware not loading (-git7 is ok)

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Date:	Sun, 11 Jan 2009 11:48:22 -0500
From:	Valdis.Kletnieks@...edu
To:	David Woodhouse <dwmw2@...radead.org>
Cc:	David Miller <davem@...emloft.net>, alessandro.suardi@...il.com,
	jaswinderlinux@...il.com, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org,
	netdev@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: 2.6.28-git8: tg3 doesn't work due to firmware not loading (-git7 is ok)

On Sun, 11 Jan 2009 12:59:59 GMT, David Woodhouse said:
> On Sun, 2009-01-11 at 12:25 +0000, David Woodhouse wrote:
> > I'll take a look and see if I can remedy that. Then we wouldn't _need_
> > the FIRMWARE_IN_KERNEL option.
> 
> How about this? If it fails to load the firmware from userspace during
> the initialisation, it'll try again later in tg3_open(). 
> 
> I _think_ that's fine, because we don't do anything else in the early
> initialisation which requires the firmware to be loaded.
> 
> So if you build with CONFIG_TIGON3=y, CONFIG_FIRMWARE_IN_KERNEL=n, you
> should see it fail to load the firmware at boot, but then it should load
> it successfully when you bring the device up.
> 
> Untested-but-otherwise-Signed-off-by: David Woodhouse <David.Woodhouse@...el.com>

I'll see if I can give it a test drive sometime in the next 24 hours or so.

One unanswered question:  What do we expect the system to do if they have this
patch, TIGON3=y, FIRMWARE_IN_KERNEL=n, and configure a netconsole for boot
messages?  I'm *hoping* the answer is "the netconsole doesn't come up at boot,
but can be re-enabled via the /sys/kernel/config/netconsole interface after
you've done an 'ifconfig eth0 up' or similar, or do a 'modprobe netconsole'.

Those seem like reasonable semantics to me - anybody got a different opinion?

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