request_firmware() backport

Hi Marcelo,

I have collected the patches for the request_firmware() interface backport for 2.4 done by Manuel Estrada Sainz. It is now in -ac for a while and I have used it successfully in my -mh patches from 2.4.18 onwards. It works fine and seems to be clean and very stable. Karsten Keil has tested it together with my ported bfusb.o Bluetooth driver on the AMD64 platform.

The individual changesets have been already sent to the mailing list some time ago. But if you want to look at them again, drop me a note and I send them to you.

One of the andvantages is that we can kick off the bfusb.h file, which contains the needed firmware for the BlueFRITZ! devices. And in future more drivers will come :)

Regards

Marcel

Please do a

bk pull http://linux-mh.bkbits.net/fw-loader-2.4

This will update the following files:

 drivers/bluetooth/bfusb.h                             |52261 ------------------
 Documentation/Configure.help                          |    6 
 Documentation/firmware_class/README                   |   58 
 Documentation/firmware_class/firmware_sample_driver.c |  121 
 Documentation/firmware_class/hotplug-script           |   16 
 drivers/bluetooth/Makefile.lib                        |    1 
 drivers/bluetooth/bfusb.c                             |   38 
 include/linux/firmware.h                              |   20 
 lib/Config.in                                         |    7 
 lib/Makefile                                          |    4 
 lib/firmware_class.c                                  |  581 
 11 files changed, 830 insertions(+), 52283 deletions(-)

through these ChangeSets:

<[email protected]> (03/08/19 1.1078.1.5)
[PATCH] Make request_firmware() compile cleanly

This patch makes the request_firmware() compile on other platforms than i386. It adds the missing include <linux/init.h> and replaces some ssize_t with int.

<[email protected]> (03/08/16 1.1078.1.4)
[Bluetooth] Make use of request_firmware() for the BlueFRITZ! USB driver

The BlueFRITZ! USB devices need a firmware download every time they are plugged in. With request_firmware() the file bfubase.frm is now loaded from the userspace and the included firmware is removed.

<[email protected]> (03/08/15 1.1078.1.3)
[PATCH] Firmware loading depends on hotplug support

This patch makes the firmware loading support only selectable if the hotplug support is also enabled.

<[email protected]> (03/08/11 1.1078.1.2)
[PATCH] Make request_firmware() compile if hotplug support is disabled

This patch fixes the problem, where hotplug support is disabled and an internal kernel driver uses request_firmware(). The driver will compile and load now, but it must handle the case where the firmware loading fails, because the kernel is build without hotplug support, by itself.

<[email protected]> (03/08/11 1.1078.1.1)
[PATCH] request_firmware() backport to 2.4 kernels

A while back request_firmware() was added to the 2.5 kernel series to support firmware needing drivers keeping the firmware images in userspace. And I also backported it to the 2.4 kernel series on top of procfs.