Re: [atomic-devel] Fedora Atomic Community Meeting Minutes 2018-04-03

[Dusty Mabe <dusty dustymabe com>]

On 04/04/2018 05:29 PM, Laura Abbott wrote:
> On 04/04/2018 02:08 PM, Dusty Mabe wrote:
>>>> 2. I had to add a "custom" rpm to enable firmware for my laptop. Is there any work toward enabling /usr/local/lib/firmware to work?
>>>> This document explains more.https://fy.blackhats.net.au/blog/html/2017/12/23/using_b43_firmware_on_fedora_atomic_workstation.html  . Currently Fedora only accepts /lib/firmware Which of course is read only on atomic
>> I'm not really sure why /usr/local/lib/firmware isn't used by Fedora.
>> Maybe we can have someone from the kernel team comment. Added cc to
>> Laura Abbott to see if she knows why.
>>
>> Dusty
> 
> For why it's not used now, b43 has a license that's incompatible
> (see https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Firmware) and we haven't
> gone out of our way to do anything with it.

Yep. absolutely didn't expect you to answer why b43 wasn't included. Was
more the /usr/local/lib/firmware question :) 

> 
> The kernel has this:
> 
> /* direct firmware loading support */
> static char fw_path_para[256];
> static const char * const fw_path[] = {
>          fw_path_para,
>          "/lib/firmware/updates/" UTS_RELEASE,
>          "/lib/firmware/updates",
>          "/lib/firmware/" UTS_RELEASE,
>          "/lib/firmware"
> };
> 
> /*
>   * Typical usage is that passing 'firmware_class.path=$CUSTOMIZED_PATH'
>   * from kernel command line because firmware_class is generally built in
>   * kernel instead of module.
>   */
> module_param_string(path, fw_path_para, sizeof(fw_path_para), 0644);
> MODULE_PARM_DESC(path, "customized firmware image search path with a higher priority than default path");
> 
> 
> so /usr/local/firmware isn't in the default path but it looks like
> you can provide your own path on the kernel command line and it
> should work. I've never tried this myself but I'd test to see if
> adding that works for you.

Cool. So providing something like firmware_class.path=/usr/local/lib/firmware
might work?? Will ask him to give that a shot.

Dusty