RE: suspend/resume support for driver requires an external firmware

RE: suspend/resume support for driver requires an external firmware

[Zhu, Yi]

Dmitry Torokhov wrote:
> Where do you load your firmware from so that you can bring up
> the network so you can mount everything via NFS in the first place?

The firmware locates together w/ the driver in the initrd which could be
either in the remote PXE server or the local diskettes. It should be
also
placed somewhere on the NFS root so that it can be picked up to
memory during suspend.

Thanks,
-yi

[OT] Re: suspend/resume support for driver requires an external firmware

[Dmitry Torokhov]

On Monday 27 September 2004 09:28 pm, Zhu, Yi wrote:
> Dmitry Torokhov wrote:
> > Where do you load your firmware from so that you can bring up
> > the network so you can mount everything via NFS in the first place?
> 
> The firmware locates together w/ the driver in the initrd which could be
> either in the remote PXE server or the local diskettes. It should be
> also
> placed somewhere on the NFS root so that it can be picked up to
> memory during suspend.
> 

Nice try :) but if a card needs a firmware to operate you most likely will
not be able to access any network resources, including PXE. Only some form
of local storage can contain kernel and firmware in this case and I would
think it will be awailable at resume time as well.

Anyway, since there are other kind of devices besides network cards that
have to be availabe before userspace comes up and a generic solution is
always better I think that this part of thread is turning into offtopic...

-- 
Dmitry

Re: [OT] Re: suspend/resume support for driver requires an external firmware

[David Dillow]

On Mon, 2004-09-27 at 23:14, Dmitry Torokhov wrote:
> On Monday 27 September 2004 09:28 pm, Zhu, Yi wrote:
> > Dmitry Torokhov wrote:
> > > Where do you load your firmware from so that you can bring up
> > > the network so you can mount everything via NFS in the first place?
> > 
> > The firmware locates together w/ the driver in the initrd which could be
> > either in the remote PXE server or the local diskettes. It should be
> > also
> > placed somewhere on the NFS root so that it can be picked up to
> > memory during suspend.
> > 
> 
> Nice try :) but if a card needs a firmware to operate you most likely will
> not be able to access any network resources, including PXE. Only some form
> of local storage can contain kernel and firmware in this case and I would
> think it will be awailable at resume time as well.

The 3Com 3cr990 family also needs external firmware (currently built
into the kernel, but it's on my TODO list to move to the loader), but it
contains enough firmware support in its flash to do PXE.

Re: [OT] Re: suspend/resume support for driver requires an external firmware

[Denis Vlasenko]

On Tuesday 28 September 2004 06:14, Dmitry Torokhov wrote:
> On Monday 27 September 2004 09:28 pm, Zhu, Yi wrote:
> > Dmitry Torokhov wrote:
> > > Where do you load your firmware from so that you can bring up
> > > the network so you can mount everything via NFS in the first place?
> > 
> > The firmware locates together w/ the driver in the initrd which could be
> > either in the remote PXE server or the local diskettes. It should be
> > also
> > placed somewhere on the NFS root so that it can be picked up to
> > memory during suspend.
> > 
> 
> Nice try :) but if a card needs a firmware to operate you most likely will
> not be able to access any network resources, including PXE.

Unless I have firmware on the initrd ;)

> Only some form
> of local storage can contain kernel and firmware in this case and I would
> think it will be awailable at resume time as well.

initrd is typically destroyed after boot is done.

> Anyway, since there are other kind of devices besides network cards that
> have to be availabe before userspace comes up and a generic solution is
> always better I think that this part of thread is turning into offtopic...

yes
--
vda

RE: suspend/resume support for driver requires an external firmware

[Patrick Mochel]

On Tue, 28 Sep 2004, Zhu, Yi wrote:

> Dmitry Torokhov wrote:
> > Where do you load your firmware from so that you can bring up
> > the network so you can mount everything via NFS in the first place?
>
> The firmware locates together w/ the driver in the initrd which could be
> either in the remote PXE server or the local diskettes. It should be
> also
> placed somewhere on the NFS root so that it can be picked up to
> memory during suspend.

I presume you're not talking about doing swsusp over NFS. If so, there's
a lot more work to be done to teach the driver model and power management
infrastructure about the dependencies involved to make that a possibility.
It's safe to say that we don't support that, and won't support that at
least for some time.

As far as the firmware goes, there are two choices - reload it from
userspace once we return or save it memory during suspend. I assume that
these devices provide some means for reading the firmware from them, so
you can just allocate a buffer and read it into that during the
transition.


	Pat