Re: CVS commit: src/sys/dev/pci

[David Brownlee <abs%NetBSD.org@localhost>]

On Fri, 14 Nov 2008, Joerg Sonnenberger wrote:

> On Fri, Nov 14, 2008 at 09:44:45PM +0000, Christos Zoulas wrote:
> > Why not save it in ram only on and during suspend? Is there an ordering
> > issue again because the disk might have already been suspended? Should
> > we add a "prepare to suspend" pass to avoid all the ordering issues?
>
> What do we want to optimise for? Seriously, wpi is using the same
> approach to wifi as ~every other device does. Keep the firmware in
> memory for whenever you will need it.
>
> Note that this is not only resume time, but it will load the firmware
> whenever if_init is called. If you really worry about the memory usage,
> the static bus dma allocation should be eliminated first. That is larger
> than the size of the firmware. But I don't think worrying about the
> 150KB image is  justified.

        Someone could extend firmload(9) to provide a caching option,
        and have a sysctl which toggles whether the cache should
        be kept in RAM or reloaded from disk, then all the different
        drivers can stop performing their own caching.

        People on low ram systems just set the sysctl.

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