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?