linux-kernel - Re: brcmsmac: firmware

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Message-ID: <515AB90C.7080509@broadcom.com>
Date:	Tue, 2 Apr 2013 12:55:08 +0200
From:	"Arend van Spriel" <arend@...adcom.com>
To:	"John Talbut" <jt@...ts.co.uk>,
	"Ben Hutchings" <ben@...adent.org.uk>,
	"David Woodhouse" <dwmw2@...radead.org>,
	linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: brcmsmac: firmware

On 03/31/2013 10:38 AM, John Talbut wrote:
> On 29/03/13 11:06, Arend van Spriel wrote:
>> On 03/29/2013 07:14 AM, John Talbut wrote:
>>>
>>> As a matter of curiosity, why is the code currently in the firmware not
>>> included in the kernel driver?
>>
>> Well. the kernel driver is what is running on the host. In your case on
>> the Atom processor. The firmware contains of initialization data for the
>> device and code that is using an instruction set that is dedicated to
>> the broadcom device so there is no way to move that into the driver
>> other than as a binary blob, but that is not acceptable in open-source
>> Linux drivers. So people in the community invented the user-space
>> firmware loading stuff.
>>
>> Gr. AvS
> 
> Hi Arend
> 
> Hmm.  As I understand it, if the source code for the initialization data
> for the device and code that is using an instruction set that is
> dedicated to the broadcom device was released then the code could be
> compiled into the kernel.
> 
> Do you have any sense of why Broadcom does not do this?

Well. Your understanding is different from mine. Here is mine: the linux
kernel aims for a separation between kernel code and firmware (mainly to
resolve licensing issues, I think) and all drivers with embedded
firmware have/are converted to using the request_firmware API. This is
described in [1].

Gr. AvS

[1]
https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/firmware/README.AddingFirmware

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