On Mon, Aug 29, 2011 at 11:08:28PM -0300, Henrique de Moraes Holschuh wrote:
On Mon, 29 Aug 2011, Borislav Petkov wrote:
So, hypothetically speaking, hpa suggested then that we could pass firmware blobs over the linked list setup_data thing in the real-mode kernel header and parse_setup_data() can look at them and map them somewhere later for the driver to find. This should be doable because you're only gonna need a handful of blobs for CPU ucode, network and GPU if the last is compiled in.
I wanted to take a serious look at that for the ucode loading, maybe I should try to shuffle some time for it...
It would be very useful, yes.
Alternatively, you could extend the initrd format to have a firmware directory appended after the filesystem image. ACPI is going to abuse the initrd in just that way to override ACPI tables very soon (patches have been already submitted to linux-acpi),
.. lemme guess: they didn't put the correct tables in the BIOS in the first place and now it is too late for a BIOS fix and want to shuffle in all those "fixes" through initrd ontop of ACPI. Oh boy, do I love all the ACPI crap stories :).
so if a more structured and extensible way to piggy-back early-init data in the initrd is needed, it would be good to bring that to the table NOW.
Yeah, that's not more than an idea right now, I haven't even started playing with it. If it turns out to be more superior, it could be reused for other things too but right now it's too early to tell.