Re: Firmware versioning best practices II

[David Woodhouse <dwmw2@infradead.org>]

On Sat, 2010-02-20 at 12:10 +0100, Johannes Berg wrote:
> On Sat, 2010-02-20 at 11:09 +0000, David Woodhouse wrote:
> > On Sat, 2010-02-20 at 12:00 +0100, Johannes Berg wrote:
> > > That doesn't make much sense anyway. If the firmware filename is
> > > foo-$APIVER-$CODEVER every code change would need a corresponding
> > driver
> > > change. If it is just foo-$APIVER then the $CODEVER can be embedded
> > in
> > > the firmware file and printed so you know which code you're using,
> > but
> > > if it doesn't influence the API I don't see why it should be part of
> > the
> > > filename? 
> > 
> > The idea is that just like with shared libraries, you have a symlink
> > from the 'soname' foo-3.fw to the actual file foo-3-1.4.1.fw.
> 
> Ah ok. I indeed do that manually with iwlwifi firmware :)
> 
> > For shared libraries, it's easy to create those symlinks automatically
> > using ldconfig. For firmware that doesn't really work though -- since
> > the soname isn't encoded in the file like it is in ELF libraries.
> 
> Right. Though I guess we could come up with a unified firmware wrapper
> format that the firmware loader can unwrap.

I suppose we could, but this seems like overkill to me.

-- 
David Woodhouse                            Open Source Technology Centre
David.Woodhouse@intel.com                              Intel Corporation