Problem (maybe a solution) loading iwi firmware: firmware_get: failed to load firmware image iwi_bss

[Erik Nørgaard]

Hi:

This question has been on various lists lately, maybe I'm on the right
track:

I looked at the source code and tried to track down what it attempts to
load. It seems that it doesn't find the firmware to load. There are two
things I found:

1) it seems it searches paths in kern.module_path, which by default is
/boot/kernel;boot/modules. But I had my firmware installed in
/boot/firmware.

2) it seems that modules that load a firmware blob are linked to this in
the linker.hints file which must also reside in module_path I suppose.

Getting the kernel modules, seems to require net/iwi-firmware-kmod, but
this does not install the firmware, it install kernel modules and the
linker.hints, although the firmware is distributed with the source.

The linker.hints file seems to be defined in the makefiles for each
kernel module, ie. in iwi_bss/Makefile you have:

KMOD= iwi_bss
FIRMWS= iwi_bss.fw:iwi_bss:300
.include <bsd.kmod.mk>

Getting the firmware seems to require net/iwi-firmware which installs
the firmware in /boot/firmware, but it seems further that filenames does
not match those in the hints file, instead of iwi_bss.fw it installs
iwi-bss.fw

So things don't match up.

A possible solution should then be: set kern.modules_path to include
/boot/firmware or copy the firmware to /boot/modules. Make sure to link
firmware files to the filename in linker.hints. That is replace '-' with
'_'.

I haven't had success with this yet - but maybe I've been messing too
much around now, need a break.

There is some development, I'm not sure if it has been imported into the
source tree yet,

  http://people.freebsd.org/~mlaier/new_iwi/

There are two files of interest:

  20060315.both.tgz 20060418.both_nofw.tgz

The former includes the firmware and seems to let you create the
linker.hints by editing the Makefiles, but beware that the firmware is
installed under yet new names.

The second is AFAIK the latest kernel modules.

Has anyone succeeded in getting this to the end and get iwi firmware to
load?

Thanks, Erik
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