Re: Firmware versioning best practices II

From: Johannes Berg
Date: Sat Feb 20 2010 - 06:10:55 EST


On Sat, 2010-02-20 at 11:09 +0000, David Woodhouse wrote:
> On Sat, 2010-02-20 at 12:00 +0100, Johannes Berg wrote:
> > That doesn't make much sense anyway. If the firmware filename is
> > foo-$APIVER-$CODEVER every code change would need a corresponding
> driver
> > change. If it is just foo-$APIVER then the $CODEVER can be embedded
> in
> > the firmware file and printed so you know which code you're using,
> but
> > if it doesn't influence the API I don't see why it should be part of
> the
> > filename?
>
> The idea is that just like with shared libraries, you have a symlink
> from the 'soname' foo-3.fw to the actual file foo-3-1.4.1.fw.

Ah ok. I indeed do that manually with iwlwifi firmware :)

> For shared libraries, it's easy to create those symlinks automatically
> using ldconfig. For firmware that doesn't really work though -- since
> the soname isn't encoded in the file like it is in ELF libraries.

Right. Though I guess we could come up with a unified firmware wrapper
format that the firmware loader can unwrap.

johannes

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