The firmware needs to be reloaded every time the chip resets.
You're not saving anything.
Or do you want a request_firmware() call failure to hose your
ethernet device when it gets a TX timeout?
<sarcasm>
Sounds like a real error resiliant system to me...
</sarcasm>
Distribution vendors can just as easily ship the driver itself
seperately to get the firmware update. And by getting it together the
user knows they are receiving something the driver maintainer tested
as a unit.
Distribution vendors just want the separation so that they don't have
to keep patching the fimrware out of the tg3.c driver source every
single release, as some do :-)
See above, you aren't saving anything. The firmware needs to stay
around so it can be reloaded into the card during exceptions.
That is, unless you want a more failure prone system.
They (actually, more specifically the maintainers) to a certain extent
are, because they are the ones who eat doo-doo when something explodes.
There are other important considerations, but
So in your "firmware updated seperately" argument above how in the
world does this work? How can you update the firmware seperately if
the MD5sum check is in the driver itself?
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