Hello!

The kernel provides the firmware interface "request_firmware" (as described in page 405 of Linux Device Drivers 3rd ed.) to fetch firmware from user space that is stored in the file system.

It would make sense to me that the firmware loading would occur in the initialisation of a device. I would also think that the driver for a device that will always be present in the system should be compiled in to the kernel.

The problem then is, that the driver initialisation could be (and in my case is being) run before the root file system has been loaded.

Is this a common problem or am I in a unique situation where I just need to compile the driver as a loadable module to get around it? Any ideas?

Personally I would just compile and load it as a module. But that's me...

Josh

You could Compile and build it with DKMS, or compile it by hand, using the distro supplied headers.
You would then need to add it to your Initrd image by doing a modprobe/depmod or adding to the modules list then updating it using your distros tools.