[pvrusb2] New driver snapshot: pvrusb2-mci-20060318

[Mike Isely]

On Sat, 18 Mar 2006, roger wrote:

> On Sat, 2006-03-18 at 18:33 -0600, Mike Isely wrote:
>
>> 1. The firmware files have been renamed.  The new names are listed in the
>> documentation, and this driver will still fall back to the old names if
>> the files could not be found under their new names.  Also, I've improved
>> the log messages in this area so you can see what names were or were not
>> found during initialization.  I've updated fwextract.pl to handle all this
>> however fwfind.sh probably still needs changes...  Roger: Care to
>> investigate this?
>
> I've put this on my agenda as time permits.
>
> Any ideas on the future handling of device firmwares?
>
> About the only way I can think of handling proprietary binary firmwares
> is hosting them all on a remote website database.  And for users
> systems, create a package called "firmwares" that will sense devices
> needing additional firmwares and downloading them from the
> database.  ... just a thought.  ... or maybe manufacturers will provide
> some help along these lines?
>
>

The problem here is that hosting the actual firmware on a site somewhere 
is a violation of copyright - you'd be distributing somebody else's 
copyrighted content.  To deal with this, one would need to obtain 
permission from the copyright holder (i.e. Hauppauge), and that could 
result in EULA terms being attached to the files.  In the case of this 
device there actually has been such an attempt to obtain permission, but 
the response was an EULA that you would all have to agree with, which even 
in the best of cases is still an additional entanglement to using this 
driver.  In fact, I could see such a thing as impacting the viability of 
getting the driver accepted into the kernel tree.

Given that the firmware can't be (legally) hosted anywhere but at 
Hauppauge's site, I've been trying to make the next best choice as 
bullet-proof as possible.  Since we all already technically have the 
firmware on our Windows driver's CDs then there is really no need to 
distribute it anyway - we only need to provide a means to get at the data 
and verify that it is correct.  And that's what fwextract.pl is for. 
That program uses MD5 sums to identify and verify the correct firmware 
data.  After all, while it isn't possible to distribute the actual bag of 
bits that is the firmware, it's certainly still legal to _describe_ that 
bag of bits in sufficient enough detail to allow anyone to locallly 
retrieve it - and that "description" is the MD5 sum(s) that fwextract.pl 
uses.

Previously fwextract.pl only had to deal with 2 firmware files, and the 
different versions of those files floating around were forward / backward 
compatible with each other.  Now, with the new 24xxx model series, there's 
an additional firmware file AND the device is different enough that the 
new FX2 firmware file is not compatible with old hardware (and new 
hardware is not compatible with the old FX2 firmware - I tested both). 
This complicates the understanding of how to use fwextract.pl.  I've 
already updated the extractor to automatically identify and work with 
these new firmware files.  If you have a new device and use fwextract.pl 
on the "driverD2" (or something like that - I forget the exact name) 
directory on the included CD, then fwextract.pl will pull out three 
firmware images for you and it will name the FX2 image differently.  (If 
you run fwextract.pl however on the root directory of that CD, you'll get 
the old firmware instead; apparently Hauppauge has packaged two versions 
of the Windows driver package on one CD.)  The fwextract.pl script uses 
MD5 sums to figure all this out - the good news here at least is that in 
spite of all this confusion, fwextract.pl will still always easily and 
reliably extract whatever makes sense for what you're pointing it at...

The problem is I have no idea what effect all this is going to have with 
fwfind.sh.  At the very least, fwfind.sh doesn't know which device it is 
extracting for and so it may download the old driver package from 
Hauppauge's site which won't be of much use to those with new devices :-(

   -Mike


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