From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S934469AbaFUKwv (ORCPT ); Sat, 21 Jun 2014 06:52:51 -0400 Received: from violet.fr.zoreil.com ([92.243.8.30]:48906 "EHLO violet.fr.zoreil.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1755089AbaFUKwt (ORCPT ); Sat, 21 Jun 2014 06:52:49 -0400 Date: Sat, 21 Jun 2014 12:52:05 +0200 From: Francois Romieu To: "Luis R. Rodriguez" Cc: cocci@systeme.lip6.fr, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, netdev@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: SmPL for automatic request_firmware_nowait() conversion Message-ID: <20140621105205.GA31611@electric-eye.fr.zoreil.com> References: <20140621015714.GX4841@wotan.suse.de> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <20140621015714.GX4841@wotan.suse.de> X-Organisation: Land of Sunshine Inc. User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.21 (2010-09-15) Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Luis R. Rodriguez : > I was just porting over an ethernet driver [0] to use request_firmware_nowait() > since firmware loading seems can take over a minute on one device, while > at it I noticed no other ethernet drivers yet use this API so figure > this may be a trend coming if devices are getting as complex as cxgb4. > The cxgb4 driver happens to even use the firmware API 3 times! There should be no problem for the firmware requests issued through ethtool in cxgb4. [...] > netdev: how worthy is this effort? Biased comment below :o) I'm wondering the benefit of automatic API changes when it could be argued that the symptoms call for driver dependant code rework. The 60 seconds delay is kind of a pavlovian signal: one can bet that the driver includes a request_firmware in its probe method. So does cxgb4. I still believe in the old school "request firmware from net_device_ops.open". I've been happy with it since f1e02ed109df5f99abf942b8ccc99960cb09dd38. This kind of rework may not be trivial for cxgb4. Please get code tested on real hardware (modular/monolithic build, with/without firmware, etc.) as I won't argue against your crusade for cxgb4. Asynchronous firmware loading provides a rather nice high level API but it's imho not the essence of network devices firmware loading problems. -- Ueimor