Do recent kernels allow firmware to load at initrd time?

[Chuck Murnane]

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=329511 and 
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=240105 both appear to 
address failure of the kernel to load firmware in the initrd phase of 
system booting. I can confirm that the second (aic94xx) bug, although it 
results in a failure during boot, if followed by rmmod aic94xx and then 
modprobe aic94xx results in firmware being properly loaded and the 
system able to make use of disks attached to the controller. I can also 
state that the nash find command locates the proper firmware file within 
the initrd file system even though the kernel fails to locate it. This 
takes place on a x86_64 system with both kernel-2.6.23.1-49.fc8 and 
kernel-2.6.23.8-63.fc8 and mkinitrd-6.0.19-4.fc8 (I modified mkinitrd to 
include the nash find command.)

My question is: is firmware loading working for anyone with recent 
Fedora kernels or is there some sort of bug in the kernel firmware 
routines exercised only by an initrd file system?