Replicant » Upstreaming patches

Kernelnewbies talks about "Add the ability for userspace to initiate the firmware load when it needs to, instead of being always initiated by the kernel"[1].

• libsamsung-ipc currently use a non-standard driver to upload the firmware. The firmware file may or may not have a partition header and the individual partitions need to be sent to the modem, potentially with the memory address at which the modem needs to load them (we have various generations with various upload / transport methods depending on the device,). So that makes it complicated to use the standard firmware upload mechanism (we'd need to bind mount a range inside the firmware file to create new files out of it, or use fuse to produce the new files, etc). So if userspace has more control it could fit our needs.
• There was also a firmware loading issue with WiFi where we re-trigger the firmware load as a workaround because the firmware is loaded too soon

• https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=97730bbb242cde22b7140acd202ffd88823886c9
• https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=536fd8184b7dfa30e28e5b459e7c5c91c3a8063f

¹ https://kernelnewbies.org/LinuxChanges for Linux 6.0