Re: Linux v2.6.27-rc1: problem with firmware stuff

["Rafael J. Wysocki" <rjw@sisk.pl>]

On Tuesday, 29 of July 2008, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> 
> It's two weeks (and one day), and the merge window is over.
> 
> Finally. I don't know why, but this one really did feel pretty dang busy. 
> And the size of the -rc1 patch bears that out - at 12MB, it's about 50% 
> bigger than 26-rc1 (but not that much bigger than 24/25-rc1, so it's not 
> like it's anything unheard of).
> 
> The pure size of the -rc's _is_ making me a bit nervous, though. Sure, it 
> means that we are good at merging it all, but I have to say that I 
> sometimes wonder if we don't merge too much in one go, and even our 
> current (fairly short) release cycle is actually too big.
> 
> Anyway, that's a discussion for some other event.
> 
> Much of -rc1 was in linux-next, but certainly not everything. We'll see 
> how that whole thing ends up evolving - it certainly didn't solve all 
> problems, and there was some bickering about things that weren't there 
> (and some things that mostly were ;), but maybe it helped.
> 
> There's a ton of new stuff in there, but at least personally the 
> interesting things are the BKL pushdown and perhaps the introduction of 
> the lockless get_user_pages_fast(). The build system also got updated to 
> allow moving the architecture include files ("include/asm-xyz") into the 
> architecture subdirectories ("arch/xyz/include/asm"), and sparc seems to 
> have taken advantage of that already.
> 
> But those changes are just small details in the end. As usual, the bulk of 
> changes are all to device drivers (roughly half, as usual), with the arch 
> directory amounting to about half of the remainder. Dirstat:
> 
>    3.2% arch/arm/
>    9.2% arch/ppc/
>   24.6% arch/
>    5.2% drivers/char/drm/
>    6.3% drivers/char/
>    4.5% drivers/gpu/drm/
>    4.5% drivers/gpu/
>    4.6% drivers/media/video/
>    5.5% drivers/media/
>    3.0% drivers/net/wireless/
>   10.7% drivers/net/
>    6.4% drivers/usb/misc/
>    4.7% drivers/usb/serial/
>   12.9% drivers/usb/
>   51.2% drivers/
>    4.4% firmware/
>    3.7% fs/
>    9.2% include/
> 
> where the bulk of that fs/ update is the merge of the UBI filesystem, to 
> pick one fairly sizeable chunk outside of arch or drivers (there's omfs 
> too, but that's tiny in comparison).
> 
> Other stuff? tracing. firmware loading.

That one happens to break things for me badly:

rafael@chimera:~/src/linux-2.6> make O=../build/mainline/chimera -j5
  GEN     /home/rafael/src/build/mainline/chimera/Makefile
  CHK     include/linux/version.h
  CHK     include/linux/utsrelease.h
  Using /home/rafael/src/linux-2.6 as source for kernel
  CALL    /home/rafael/src/linux-2.6/scripts/checksyscalls.sh
  CHK     include/linux/compile.h
  Building modules, stage 2.
Kernel: arch/x86/boot/bzImage is ready  (#208)
  MODPOST 564 modules
  IHEX2FW firmware/emi26/loader.fw
Failed to open destination file: Permission deniedihex2fw: Convert ihex files into binary representation for use by Linux kernel
usage: ihex2fw [<options>] <src.HEX> <dst.fw>
       -w: wide records (16-bit length)
       -s: sort records by address
  IHEX2FW firmware/emi26/bitstream.fw
  IHEX2FW firmware/emi26/firmware.fw
Failed to open destination file: Permission deniedihex2fw: Convert ihex files into binary representation for use by Linux kernel
usage: ihex2fw [<options>] <src.HEX> <dst.fw>
       -w: wide records (16-bit length)
       -s: sort records by address
make[2]: *** [firmware/emi26/loader.fw] Error 1
make[2]: *** Waiting for unfinished jobs....
make[2]: *** [firmware/emi26/bitstream.fw] Error 1
Failed to open destination file: Permission deniedihex2fw: Convert ihex files into binary representation for use by Linux kernel
usage: ihex2fw [<options>] <src.HEX> <dst.fw>
       -w: wide records (16-bit length)
       -s: sort records by address
make[2]: *** [firmware/emi26/firmware.fw] Error 1
make[1]: *** [modules] Error 2
make: *** [sub-make] Error 2

Thanks,
Rafael