On Tuesday 18 September 2007 21:05, Michael Chan wrote:
quoted text
> The bnx2 firmware changes quite frequently.  A new driver quite often
> requires new firmware to work correctly.  Splitting them up makes things
> difficult for the user.

sounds reasonable.

I see that bnx2 has support for unpacking gzipped binary blobs,
and it it the only such net driver (maybe the only such driver
in the entire tree, I didn't check).

This can be very useful for all other firmware images in other drivers.

Last night I prepared a patch which basically separates unpacking
function from bnx2-related code. Can you run-test attached patch?

Meanwhile I will prepare follow-on patch which actually moves this
function out of the driver and into lib/*.

Size difference:

# size */bn*.o
   text    data     bss     dec     hex filename
  54884   81689    6424  142997   22e95 net/bnx2.o
  55276   81823    6424  143523   230a3 net.org/bnx2.o

Signed-off-by: Denys Vlasenko <vda.linux@googlemail.com>
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vda