The following reply was made to PR kern/32342; it has been noted by GNATS.

From: Iain Hibbert <plunky@rya-online.net>
To: gnats-bugs@netbsd.org
Cc: kern-bug-people@netbsd.org, gnats-admin@netbsd.org,
	netbsd-bugs@netbsd.org
Subject: Re: kern/32342: OpenBSD firmware loading framework
Date: Mon, 19 Dec 2005 23:48:39 +0000 (GMT)

 On Mon, 19 Dec 2005, Jason Thorpe wrote:
 
 > The following reply was made to PR kern/32342; it has been noted by GNATS.
 >
 >  On Dec 19, 2005, at 2:49 PM, Rui Paulo wrote:
 >
 >  > On 2005.12.19 14:20:53 -0800, Jason Thorpe wrote:
 >  > |
 >  > Is there any device driver in our tree that tries to load the firmware
 >  > in pieces at a time ? I know this could change in the future.
 >
 >  dev/pci/cz.c
 
 the firmware image (dev/microcode/cyclades-z/cyzfirm.h) is in one chunk
 though. Wow thats a big chunk of firmware (does that get paged out?)
 
 ubt/ubtbcmfw.c actually does load firmware in chunks and feeds it to the
 usb driver piecemeal. However, for the bt3c device it would probably like
 to read it all at once in any case (its <4k) as its an ASCII file and
 needs to be parsed before writing it (in 15 word blocks) to the device.
 
 hm.
 
 1. It seems to me that it would be better to read such a firmware file one
 time and free it after use than to waste a chunk of memory (even if paged
 out) for ever.
 
 2.
 
 int
 load_firmware(const char *, int (*func)(void *, uint8_t *, size_t), size_t, void *)
 
 
 	load_firmware("filename", load_func, chunk_size, arg);
 
 		if chunk_size == 0
 			len = file size;
 		else
 			len = min(chunk_size, residual)
 
 	load_func(arg, ptr, len)
 
 would enable both options..?
 
 iain