cvs commit: src/sys/modules/iwi Makefile src/sys/dev/iwi if_iwi.c if_iwireg.h if_iwivar.h

[John Baldwin]

On Monday 21 November 2005 12:44 pm, Damien Bergamini wrote:
> I don't like the idea of keeping the firmware in kernel memory.
> It's a rather big file (~200KB).
> And there is one for each operating mode (BSS, IBSS, monitor).
>
> The second reason why I don't like KLDs is because they require
> user intervention and users must know which KLD to load for the
> mode they want to operate in.  And if you put all firmwares in
> the same KLD, you end up with a big fat 1MB file.
>
> I won't go back to anything based on iwicontrol.  People simply
> don't know how to use it.  Trust me.  There is not a single day
> where I don't get email from people complaining about it.

Whatever logic you are doing in the kernel now to figure out which firmware to 
use you can just as easily do in the kerenl and trigger it by sending a devd 
event.  You could have the userland side do an ioctl to get the type of 
firmware the driver wants for example.  There is _ZERO_ reason that you have 
to do this in the kernel.  You can move this logic out to userland and be 
much more robust in the process.  As it is, trying to do VOP_READ() in the 
resume path is going to greatly diminish the robustness of suspend/resume.  
Moving this to userland is not a hard problem.

-- 
John Baldwin <jhb at FreeBSD.org>  <><  http://www.FreeBSD.org/~jhb/
"Power Users Use the Power to Serve"  =  http://www.FreeBSD.org