[alsa-devel] Merging the new firmware files for CA0132 into alsa-firmware

[Pierre-Louis Bossart]

On 5/28/19 11:38 AM, Jaroslav Kysela wrote:
> Dne 28. 05. 19 v 16:54 Takashi Iwai napsal(a):
>> Hi,
>>
>> it seems that Connor's previous attempt to put a couple of ca0132
>> firmware files into linux-firmware tree didn't go through,
>> unfortunately.  And now I'm thinking of taking them into alsa-firmware
>> package as a stop-gap.  We already distribute other ca0132 firmware
>> files, so the addition shouldn't be a big problem.
>>
>> Jaroslav, what do you think?
> 
> No problem. The same situation is for the SoC SOF firmware files (drivers are
> in kernel, firmware files are missing). Perhaps, we can release those files
> quickly in alsa-firmware and then migrate them slowly to linux-firmware.

for SOF there are 4 cases

1. developers/integrators build from scratch themselves from the public 
tree.
2. integrators build from scratch with their own secret sauce added.
3. distros want a binary since they don't want to build from source 
and/or don't have access to all the DSP tools
4. distros needs a binary signed with the Intel production key (e.g. to 
run on devices initially designed for Windows).

So far we were mostly dealing with case 1. Case 2 is allowed by the SOF 
permissive license and there's no need to look into this. We are 
planning releases for the last two cases, with a cadence aligned with 
kernel updates. It's not fully clear to me if the linux-firmware tree is 
the 'right' solution since ideally we'd want to have firmware, topology 
and UCM files released at the same time.