linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH] rust: add basic ELF sections parser

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Message-ID: <CAOZdJXVvmDro0Mv36grqQ6LB_1O5GzwPx+Dde+wsfu9Cu_me7A@mail.gmail.com>
Date: Fri, 30 May 2025 13:10:50 -0500
From: Timur Tabi <timur@...nel.org>
To: Greg KH <gregkh@...uxfoundation.org>
Cc: Alexandre Courbot <acourbot@...dia.com>, Danilo Krummrich <dakr@...nel.org>, Timur Tabi <timur@...nel.org>, 
	John Hubbard <jhubbard@...dia.com>, Miguel Ojeda <ojeda@...nel.org>, 
	Alex Gaynor <alex.gaynor@...il.com>, Boqun Feng <boqun.feng@...il.com>, 
	Gary Guo <gary@...yguo.net>, Björn Roy Baron <bjorn3_gh@...tonmail.com>, 
	Benno Lossin <benno.lossin@...ton.me>, Andreas Hindborg <a.hindborg@...nel.org>, 
	Alice Ryhl <aliceryhl@...gle.com>, Trevor Gross <tmgross@...ch.edu>, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, 
	rust-for-linux@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH] rust: add basic ELF sections parser

On Fri, May 30, 2025 at 10:42 AM Greg KH <gregkh@...uxfoundation.org> wrote:
>
> On Fri, May 30, 2025 at 11:34:02PM +0900, Alexandre Courbot wrote:
> > So to try to answer your question, I am not disagreeing that userspace
> > is capable of doing what we currently do in the kernel. My follow-up
> > questions to that are: how do we command userspace to do that work for
> > us when we request the firmware, how do we provide the result to the
> > kernel, and is this something that distros can adopt easily? I'm happy
> > to consider doing things this way, but would need a few pointers to look
> > into.
>
> Again, look at how your firmware for your devices in your laptop are
> loaded today.

Today, Nouveau loads and parses these binary images (that are already
in linux-firmware) in the driver.  As I said before, Nova/Nouveau are
using ELF simply as a packaging format, so that these small binary
blobs are kept together and processed as one.  It makes no sense for
Nouveau to consume them as-is, but Nova has to have user-space break
them up first.

We could easily have said that the format is proprietary and not used
the word "elf" in the parser.

IMHO, Nova should really do what Nouveau does, and just have the image
parser in the driver itself, without any generic Rust code to do it.
After all, what Nova needs to do with these images is driver-specific.