[Bug 328550] Re: qla2xxx takes ~one minute to initialize per device

[Steve Langasek]

I'm reopening this bug.  This is not a wishlist at all; it's a
significant regression for users of this hardware, that will affect both
new installs and LTS->LTS upgrades.  While I agree that doubling the
size of all initramfses unreasonably penalizes users without this
hardware, we do need to have a solution that works out of the box for
users /with/ this hardware - if always including this firmware in the
initramfs isn't reasonable, then we should entertain other options, such
as using a different policy for server kernels or opportunistically
adding the firmware to the initramfs *if* it's detected that the module
is needed on the hardware where the initramfs is built (or if it's
detected that the root device uses it).

Now, in the udev in Ubuntu 9.10, I see that /usr/share/initramfs-
tools/hooks/udev *does* include the following code:

for rules in 50-udev-default.rules 50-firmware.rules 60-persistent-storage.rules 61-persistent-storage-edd.rules 64-device-mapper.rules 80-drivers.rules 95-udev-late.rules; do
    cp -p /lib/udev/rules.d/$rules ${DESTDIR}/lib/udev/rules.d
done
[...]
copy_exec /lib/udev/firmware.sh /lib/udev

So I don't believe udev in 9.10 is actually buggy - the firmware loading
hooks are present in the initramfs!

It looks like only initramfs-tools itself has a bug, because only
firmware for modules that are explicitly singled out in /usr/share
/initramfs-tools/hook-functions are included in the initramfs.  There,
firmware is *only* copied if it's found in the /lib/modules/$(uname -r)
directory - not if it's found in /lib/firmware.  This is inconsistent,
and appears to be a straightforward bug due to an oversight rather than
a design decision.

Correcting this pulls in only 6 more firmware files, adds 684k
(unpacked; 315k packed) to the initramfs size, and the change is also
included already in the newer version of the update-initramfs package
upstream in Debian.  So I think this is the obviously correct change to
make here.

** Package changed: udev (Ubuntu) => initramfs-tools (Ubuntu)

** Changed in: initramfs-tools (Ubuntu)
   Importance: Medium => High

** Changed in: initramfs-tools (Ubuntu)
       Status: Won't Fix => In Progress

** Changed in: initramfs-tools (Ubuntu)
     Assignee: (unassigned) => Steve Langasek (vorlon)

-- 
qla2xxx takes ~one minute to initialize per device
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/328550
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