Subject: Re: kern/32342: OpenBSD firmware loading framework
To: Jason Thorpe <thorpej@shagadelic.org>
From: Iain Hibbert <plunky@rya-online.net>
List: netbsd-bugs
Date: 12/20/2005 01:01:57
On Mon, 19 Dec 2005, Jason Thorpe wrote:

> On Dec 19, 2005, at 3:48 PM, Iain Hibbert wrote:
>
> > On Mon, 19 Dec 2005, Jason Thorpe wrote:
> > the firmware image (dev/microcode/cyclades-z/cyzfirm.h) is in one chunk
> > though. Wow thats a big chunk of firmware (does that get paged out?)
>
> But a given driver instance only needs a few parts of the image, and needs to
> be able to seek around in that image it has section headers, etc.).

does the cz driver need to keep the image around to fiddle with later or
is it finished with once the attach is done? (do any drivers need to do
that?)  Necessarily I'm thinking that during startup there will be nothing
else competing for the use of the memory.

Which makes me think of something else - would this actually be useful for
devices that load firmware as part of their configuration sequence?  The
pcmcia card does not load firmware until it is enabled (manually or rc.d)
but the cz card seems to do it in cz_attach - is the filesystem available
at this point?

I confess I have no idea how to use the uvm system (which I'm guessing is
the way to touch pageable memory?)

iain