On Mon, Jun 09, 2008 at 03:15:05PM +0100, David Woodhouse wrote:
On Mon, 2008-06-09 at 09:40 -0400, Don Zickus wrote:
On Mon, Jun 09, 2008 at 11:04:08AM +0100, David Woodhouse wrote:
Been playing with how I'd make the kernel package deal with the new 'make firmware_install' stuff. Currently looks something like this.
Is that something new upstream? It would be great to separate the firmware from the kernel builds.
http://lwn.net/Articles/284104/ http://lwn.net/Articles/284932/
git.infradead.org/users/dwmw2/firmware-2.6.git
Thanks for the links. The discussion was helpful.
I suspect that (for now) we should make the kernel binary packages depend on kernel-firmware?
Should the package own the /lib/firmware/ directory?
Ideally we'll want kernel-firmware to be a .noarch.rpm, but we can't get that until we start to build it from a separate srpm.
I assume the %install would cause a rebuild of the initrd to deal with storage device firmware on bootup?
The kernel install already does that. Perhaps we should ensure that kernel-firmware gets updated before the kernel proper, to ensure that the new firmware is included.
Or maybe always rebuild initrd when installing kernel-firmware? It's a little overkill but handles scenarios when the vendor updates their storage blob but we have no new kernel update to go with it (that's probably a little long term thinking to handle the scenario when you actually separate the srpms..).
We were trying to do this with RHEL (jcm was working on this). One of the issues I brought up (which no one had a solution for) was the case for a bad firmware for storage devices. Currently they are built into the kernel. So if you stumble upon bad firmware, you just boot the previous working kernel. How would this be handled with everything under /lib/firmware? I guess a previously working initrd image might suffice.
Yeah, the previous kernel would have had its initrd generated when that kernel was installed. That initrd should continue to work.
Yeah, not sure why I didn't think of this months ago when I was discussing this with folks internally.
Cheers, Don