Qla2xxx: Initramfs no longer required

[blu3bird]

If you own a SPARC system with a qla2xxx fibre channel adapter - SUN Blade 1000/2000 for instance - you have been through a lot to get it working with a recent kernel.

Before kernel 2.6.18 was released it worked out of the box but then the firmware has been removed from the kernel(due to licence issues) and an initramfs was required to boot such a system.

http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/base/sparc/qla2xxx.xml was created to assist users in creating such an initramfs.

Not any more!

In kernel 2.6.27 a new features has been added that allows you to compile 3rd party (including non-GPL) firmwares directly into the kernel.

To set it up you need to install the kernel

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>=sys-kernel/vanilla-sources-2.6.27_rc1
	or
>=sys-kernel/gentoo-sources-2.6.27

and the firmware for the qla2xxx adapter

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sys-block/qla-fc-firmware

open up your kernel's menuconfig and set

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Device Drivers  --->
	Generic Driver Options  --->
		External firmware blobs to build into the kernel binary

to "ql2200_fw.bin"

and

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Device Drivers  --->
	Generic Driver Options  --->
		Firmware blobs root directory

to "/lib/firmware"

translated to .config this means:

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CONFIG_EXTRA_FIRMWARE="ql2200_fw.bin"
CONFIG_EXTRA_FIRMWARE_DIR="/lib/firmware"

Compile it, boot it and during the boot-process you'll see this line that indicates that everything works as it should:

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firmware: using built-in firmware ql2200_fw.bin

Please note, the linux kernel is GPL, the qla2xxx firmware is NOT. That means you may not redistribute the resulting kernel image.
However, you may redistribute both, the linux kernel(source) and the firmware seperatly(under the terms of their licences) and provide instructions to others on how to compile it.

[Ferris]

Note also that once again you do not want to build the kernel driver as a module if you want to boot from a qla2xxx fibre channel disk. You will want:

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CONFIG_SCSI_QLA_FC=y

Regards,