The following reply was made to PR kern/32342; it has been noted by GNATS.
From: Jason Thorpe <thorpej (AT) shagadelic (DOT) org>
To: Iain Hibbert <plunky (AT) rya-online (DOT) net>
Cc: gnats-bugs (AT) netbsd (DOT) org, kern-bug-people (AT) netbsd (DOT) org,
gnats-admin (AT) netbsd (DOT) org, netbsd-bugs (AT) netbsd (DOT) org
Subject: Re: kern/32342: BSD firmware loading framework
Date: Mon, 19 Dec 2005 20:36:00 -0800
Dec 19, 2005, at 5:01 PM, Iain Hibbert wrote:
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.
The cz driver does it early in order to query some parameters about
the device. But it could be deferred until first open, certainly.
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?
To use this interface at all, you have to wait until the root file
system is mounted.
-- thorpej