Quotes of the week part 2: the firmware flamewar

Not 15 minutes after David posted his note, we're now up to 11 reports; and this is only from an -mm patch series. Can you imagine the number of bug reports if this were allowed to ship in a mainline kernel.org release? One good thing is that we can definitely show that there people that are downloading, compiling and trying to build the -mm kernel. :-)

External firmware is by design an error prone system, even with versioning. But by being built and linked into the driver, it is fool proof.

On a technical basis alone, we would never disconnect a crucial component such as firmware, from the driver. The only thing charging these transformations, from day one, is legal concerns.

All forms of change introduce _some_ risk of breakage, of course. In this case, as usual, I've tried to be careful to avoid regressions. The most important part, obviously, was having a way to build firmware into the static kernel.

When it comes to _modules_, doing that would introduce a certain amount of complexity which just doesn't seem necessary -- if you can load modules, then you have userspace, and you can use hotplug for firmware too. Especially given that so many modern drivers already _require_ you to do that, so the users understand it, and the tools like mkinitrd already cope with it -- checking MODULE_FIRMWARE() for the modules they include and including the appropriate files automatically. [...]

You need to stay sober for long enough to say 'Y' when it asks you if you want to build the required firmware into the kernel. And we even made that the _default_ now, for the benefit of those who can't stay sober that long. (Perhaps we'll make 'allyesconfig' the default next?)