Bug 85661

Summary: Double Firmware for Radeon GPUs (at least HAWAII)
Product: Drivers Reporter: Kai Wasserbäch (debian)
Component: Video(DRI - non Intel)Assignee: drivers_video-dri
Status: RESOLVED INVALID    
Severity: normal CC: alexdeucher, mike
Priority: P1    
Hardware: All   
OS: Linux   
Kernel Version: 3.17.0 Subsystem:
Regression: No Bisected commit-id:

Description Kai Wasserbäch 2014-10-06 08:13:50 UTC 
Not sure if this is a mistake or I'm missing something here, but I was looking at <https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/firmware/linux-firmware.git/tree/radeon> and noticed, that there are firmware files of the same name – except case – but different content for HAWAII and others, eg. HAWAII_ce.bin and hawaii_ce.bin:
7fa992d86295f741e8cdea76c5b6c632  linux-firmware/radeon/HAWAII_ce.bin
9e05820da42549ce9c89d147cf1f8e19  linux-firmware/radeon/hawaii_ce.bin
For other firmware parts (eg. mc2) there is only one version available.

Now the question is: is this intended? Or should there only be one version? If I had to guess, I'd say the lower-case variants are the current ones, since they have the same checksums as the firmware I've downloaded from <http://people.freedesktop.org/~agd5f/radeon_ucode/> in the course of <https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=78453>.
Comment 1 Mike Lothian 2014-10-06 08:29:57 UTC 
The small case firmware is the new firmware images that resolve some bugs

I'm hoping in future they have a better versioning system

I'm guessing they thought they wouldn't need to release fixes
Comment 2 Alex Deucher 2014-10-06 13:17:50 UTC 
Yes, this is intended.  The new firmware uses a new header format with version information in the header so we can update that version seemlessly without needing a add driver support for a new firmware file.  The upper case firmware is the old version for kernels without explicit support for the new firmware.
Comment 3 Kai Wasserbäch 2014-10-06 13:37:40 UTC 
And that there's no lower-case mc2 firmware is ok too? If so, then this bug can be closed as "not a bug". Sorry for the noise.
Comment 4 Alex Deucher 2014-10-06 14:09:45 UTC 
Correct, there is no lowercase mc2.
Comment 5 Kai Wasserbäch 2014-10-06 15:09:39 UTC 
Not a bug, just confusing. Thanks, Alex, for explaining this.