[gentoo-kernel] sys-kernel/mips-firmware: thoughts?

[Joshua Kinard]

For some time now, I've been trying to maintain a patch that kludges the
external firmware loader and specific firmware blobs back into the kernel
for sys-kernel/mips-sources.  This works fine up until 5.6, which seems to
have further changed the way that firmware is loaded that breaks my existing
patch in a not-so-obvious way.  I am not terribly inclined to keep debugging
this, so I think it's time to throw in the towel and use external firmware
loading.

This brings up the issue that frankly, sys-kernel/linux-firmware is overkill
for currently-supported MIPS targets.  Speaking for just the SGI systems,
MIPS literally needs only 4 firmware blobs (1 is critical, 1 optional, the
other two are for the future):
  - acenic/tg2.bin:   optional for ACENIC/Tigon II PCI cards
  - qlogic/1040.bin:  required for QLA1040 on SGI IP27, IP30
  - qlogic/1280.bin:  future use (maybe on SGI IP35?)
  - qlogic/12160.bin: future use (maybe on SGI IP35?)

I wanted to see if there would be any problem with creating a
sys-kernel/mips-firmware package to contain, at least initially, these four
firmware files from the linux-firmware repo, and install them to either
/lib/firmware-mips or /usr/share/mips-firmware (thinking more the latter to
avoid polluting /lib any further).

These four blobs have not seen updates in years, so I anticipate there being
only a single ebuild for sys-kernel/mips-firmware.  It'll be versioned like
the virtual packages (mips-firmware-1, -2, -3, etc), rather than by
datestamp, as the only times a version bump happens is if the firmware blobs
ever change or we add/remove a blob.

Thoughts/feedback?

-- 
Joshua Kinard
Gentoo/MIPS
kumba@g.o
rsa6144/5C63F4E3F5C6C943 2015-04-27
177C 1972 1FB8 F254 BAD0 3E72 5C63 F4E3 F5C6 C943

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