Re: New iwn firmware & upgrade procedure

[Havard Eidnes <he%NetBSD.org@localhost>]

>> 1) Could the if_iwn driver fall back to using the 6000g2a-5 microcode
>>    without any code changes?  (My gut feeling says "yes", but I have
>>    no existence proof of that.)
>
> Unless it's really necessary (ABI change in accessing device with new
> firmware), it seems that the firmware should just be named for the
> device and not have the firmware version.  Thus you'd get the version
> you have in tree, and that might be a little old.  Alternatively there
> could be a symlink.  But I don't understand why it is versioned.

"Upstream decision" is my guess, possibly as part of "release bit
identification" if/when there's changes to the firmware.

BTW, for this specific problem, I now know that providing the new
name as a symlink to the old file makes the new driver basically
work, at least in my case, so that means the driver could have a
fallback if we wanted.  Though... There's no "search list" or
"alternative name" field provided for the firmware file in the
driver (yet), but that looks like a SMOP.

It seems we released the iwlwifi-6000g2a-5 version as part of at
least 9.2 if not 9.0, so it's not like it's just a backward
compatibility issue with an earlier version of -current (which
would possibly be of minor concern).

I can see "My wifi doesn't work anymore after a kernel upgrade!"
can act as a major turnoff...

>> Should the wireless firmware go into a different set which we also
>> learn the habit of extracting before reboot of the kernel?
>
> If the versioning is really intractable and frequent, perhaps, but I
> think this can be 99% solved by not putting firmware versions in
> filenames.
>
> A quick skim of /libdata/firmware makes me think it is mostly not
> versioned.

Really?  I suspect all the if_iwn files are versioned; if it
follows the pattern for iwlwifi-6000g2a-5, the number behind the
last hyphen is the version number.

Regards,

- Håvard