Patch "b43: refuse to load unsupported firmware" has been added to the 3.0-stable tree

[Rafał Miłecki]

W dniu 17 listopada 2011 12:42 użytkownik Michael Büsch <m at bues.ch> napisał:
> On Thu, 17 Nov 2011 12:37:10 +0100
> Rafał Miłecki <zajec5 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> W dniu 17 listopada 2011 12:19 użytkownik Michael Büsch <m at bues.ch> napisał:
>> > On Thu, 17 Nov 2011 09:42:04 +0100
>> > Rafał Miłecki <zajec5 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> >> 1) Broadcom driver doesn't contain info about firmware version
>> >
>> > In fact it does. The microcode does contain the version, of course.
>> >
>> >> 2) Because of that b43-fwcutter can't name files correctly
>> >
>> > And fwcutter is even able to extract it from the dump. It also
>> > does so currently.
>> >
>> >> 3) Discovering firmware version requires loading it to the firmware
>> >> and reading from SHM
>> >
>> > No.
>>
>> I had no idea about that, but I admit, I didn't read the whole
>> b43-fwcutter code. Thanks for explaining.
>>
>> What about API level (revsion?)? Do you think b43-fwcutten can extract
>> that? This would be perfect solution to include API level in firmware
>> file name.
>>
>
> I'm not sure what you are referring to by "API level". I didn't
> follow the latest firmware development too closely. Is that something new?
>
> fwcutter contains a tiny trivial disassembler that is able to extract various
> immediates from the microcode. So if your versioning is stored as immediates
> in the code, it's trivial to add extraction for it.
>
> fwcutter currently extracts (and prints) ucode version, patchlevel, date and time.

http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/dwmw2/linux-firmware.git;a=commit;h=a531257c40920de0161150091eaccbbc1182eb96

It seems Broadcom wants using some basename-apiversion syntax for
their firmware files... but indeed it does not make much sense to me.

According to their firmware, current API is 0. I assume it from
reading file name which is bcm43xx-0.fw. It does not make much sense,
as we had at least 2 earlier APIs.

Looks like dead end.

Don't know what else we can propose. Putting exact version and
patchlevel will make it complex (a lot of firmwares are available).

-- 
Rafał