Hello Marcel,
>>> ... send to Linus only. (You don't want a 150kB bzip2 compressed 
>>> firmware blob, don't you? In case you do, drop me a line.)
> 
> 
>> the request_firmware() framework is part of Linux 2.4 and 2.6 and so for
>> most drivers the firmware file can be loaded from userspace through proc
>> or sysfs. Please take a look at it.

> Yes, we know. When I looked at it the last time, there were some 
> problems that kept us from actually finishing the work.
> 
> (If you did not use a hotplug agent, then the system was frozen, because 
> the firmware foo did not use it's own workqueue)

As a follow-up to my post: I just checked what already got in and what's 
still missing. I attached the stuff from request_firmwar() that didn't 
make it into the kernel yet.

Please note that I did not check if the problem has been solved 
otherwise. Perhaps Manuel Estrada Sainz <ranty@debian.org> can tell us 
what the current state is?

CU
Michael.