Jirka Bohac wrote:
On Wed, Jun 08, 2005 at 05:44:20PM +0300, Denis Vlasenko wrote:
On Wednesday 08 June 2005 17:23, Pavel Machek wrote:
What's the prefered way to solve this one? Only load firmware when
user does ifconfig eth1 up? [It is wifi, it looks like it would be
better to start firmware sooner so that it can associate to the
AP...].
Do you want to associate to an AP when your kernel boots,
_before_ any iwconfig had a chance to configure anything?
That's strange.
My position is that wifi drivers must start up in an "OFF" mode.
Do not send anything. Do not join APs or start IBSS.
Agreed.
Thus, no need to load fw in early boot.
I don't think this is true. Loading the firmware on the first
"ifconfig up" is problematic. Often, people want to rename the
device from ethX/wlanX/... to something stable. This is usually
based on the adapter's MAC address, which is not visible until
the firmware is loaded.
Prism54 does it this way and it really sucks. You need to bring
the adapter up to load the firmware, then bring it back down,
rename it, and bring it up again.
The atmel driver includes a small firmware stub which does nothing but
determine the MAC address, to solve this problem. This is compiled into
the driver and so doesn't depend on request_firmware(). The stub was
created by reverse engineering the card and is GPL, so there's no
problem including it in the kernel.
This is not a general solution, since it depends on the ability to
create such MAC reader firmware, but it might be a possibility in this case.
Cheers,
Simon.
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