> Who in the world is going to actually want request_firmware() to find
That misses the point, intentionally I am sure. In the majority of cases
the firmware doesn't change between releases so shipping a billion copies
of is a pain in the butt.
Not shipping lots of copies
Not leaving crap locked in kernel memory when it isn't needed
Letting vendors issue firmware updates (which especially in enterprise
space is a big issue and right now gets messy with compiled in firmware)
And their users and the distributors for whom it can cause enormous pain.
If the two are closely tied then it makes a lot of sense to keep them
tied, but that doesn't mean wasting a ton of kernel memory and bandwidth
and disk space in the process. Loading the firmware and insisting on a
specific version is quite civilised for a driver with such a tie.
(of course we had this argument over ten years ago about modules when
various authors couldn't be bothered to modularise their driver which
caused endless pain to the distributions and end users. Remember the
sound driver situation in early Red Hat. Mind you it got me a job there
fixing it ;))
Driver authors aren't God. There are other important considerations, but
for tg3 if that means 'wrong MD5sum, no load' then fine.
Alan
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