Downloading the firmware

By using the device tree, we're now able to specify a lot of different settings for our driver, but there is still one last thing we have to see: how to load firmware into our device. In fact, some devices may require a program for themselves to work which, for license reasons, cannot be linked within the kernel.

In this section, we're going to see some examples of how we can ask the kernel to load firmware for our device.

Getting ready

Some peripherals need firmware to work and then we need a mechanism to load such binary data into them. Linux provides us with different mechanisms to do this job and they all refer to the request_firmware() function.

Whenever we use a request_firmware(....