Re: Firmware compression

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

On Sun, 4 May 2008, Andrew Doran wrote:

> We have a meg or two of firmware images in the i386 GENERIC kernel, which is
> insane. I was thinking of adding a function that would use kmem_alloc+zlib
> to decompress images, and another to optionally free the decompressed image.
> It would probably also be good to add a simple program under dev/microcode
> to take a blob and spit out a compressed array in a C file.

        Only a (potentially) unhelpful one:

        Would it make sense to integrate this with firmload(9) such
        that the firmware images could be linked into the kernel or
        loaded from the filesystem on demand? Or is that a dead end
        and the firmware which can be distributed should just be zlib
        included in the appropriate kernel module (when everything is
        built as modules :)

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