[arch-general] [arch-dev-public] kernel 2.6.34-1

[Evangelos Foutras]

On 17/05/10 22:24, Mauro Santos wrote:
> I have noticed that if I don't have radeon_ucode [1] installed then
> early or late KMS don't work and I get just a black screen. However I
> didn't wait 1 minute to check if after a while the boot process resumes.
>
> [1] http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=33016

My experience with an integrated Radeon HD 4200 card and KMS is similar. 
Without radeon_ucode, everything will work fine until I need to resume 
from suspend-to-ram. The screen will then just stay in standby mode for 
about a minute (a couple of seconds, give or take) before it'll come to 
life again. With either KMS disabled or radeon_ucode installed, this 
problem doesn't occur.

It appears that, in my case, the card requests a firmware file named 
R600_rlc.bin which is included in radeon_ucode. If you google this file, 
you'll find several instances in which this file has been discussed.

Some insightful discussion is here: http://lkml.org/lkml/2010/1/26/169.

In particular, notice Alex's reply stating:

--8<--------------------------------------------------------------------
In general, microcode is slowly being moved out of the kernel and into 
the Linux firmware tree:
http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/dwmw2/linux-firmware.git;a=tree
Eventually all of the radeon microcode will end up out up in that tree.
--8<--------------------------------------------------------------------

I'm not sure what this means for our kernel26-firmware package, but I 
believe we would want to ship the files included in the "Linux firmware 
tree".

What do you think? :)