Comment 35 for bug 74004

On Mon, Oct 22, 2007 at 10:53:13AM -0000, Tore Anderson wrote:
> * Matt Zimmerman
> > It looks like you're running a custom kernel. The firmware provided
> > with the Ubuntu kernel is in /lib/firmware/<kernel version>, and
> > that's where initramfs-tools looks for it. Perhaps your firmware is
> > in a different place?
>
> You're right I run a custom kernel (need it for mptsas and dm-rdac).
> Anyway, the QLogic firmware image is kernel version agnostic (and not
> shipped in the Ubuntu kernel package either, for that matter), so it's
> found in /lib/firmware/ql2400_fw.bin. The firmware_helper looks for it
> there out of the box.

In this case, that may be true, but firmware is often tied to the version of
the driver, so we always bind them together. It's happened in the past that
firmware changes incompatibly across releases of a driver.

> > Your script copies all of /lib/firmware, while the one in the fixed
> > initramfs-tools copies only the firmware shipped with our kernel, so
> > that seems likely to be the cause of your problem.
>
> Maybe you should make it so that initramfs-tools copies in kernel
> version agnostic firmware images as well as the kernel version specific
> ones? That way it it will work the same during initramfs and after
> boot, which is how I'd expect it at least.

I agree, that seems intuitively correct and it should be straightforward to
add support for this. Changing behaviour like this would be better done in
the development branch, though, rather than in an update to 6.06 LTS.

--
 - mdz