[ARMedslack] What's the difference between USB<->serial devices on Arm Slack and Intel Slack?

[Stuart Winter]

> complains about missing firmware. I went ahead and copied several likely
> looking files out of /lib/firmware on the Intel machine over to the Arm,

On the intel, grep for the file names you copied across and find out
which package they came from.

Slackware intel has an a/kernel-firmware package which populates some of
/lib/firmware; ARM has this /lib/firmware stuff in the kernel-modules
package because I only noticed a few months ago that there was a separate
kernel-firmware package in Slackware (since ARM doesn't follow Slackware's
kernel at all).
This actually means that we have duplicated /lib/firmware files in both
the "versatile" and "kirkwood" kernel_modules packages (not that it really
matters - but I might address this at some point).

> and things are working a bit better (I suspect it's fixed at this
> point), but where are those files even populated from? There doesn't
> seem to be anything in the L series that's random-firmware-crap.txz,

root at zaden:~/slackware64-current/slackware64# find . -iname '*-fw-*.t?z' | wc -l
13

It might be in one of these packages, but as I said - the best place is
to look for the specific files you copied.

I'm not too familiar with why the kernel firmware stuff gets built but I
suspect it's just because support for a specific driver is compiled in, or
is compiled as a module, so the corresponding fw is built and
packaged/installed when "make modules_install" is run.  So I'd guess that
it's because armedslack's kernel config doesn't have support for the same
drivers as x86.  Historically I've only included specifically what could
be physically present or connected to a board, which worked well; but
with USB and now some ARM devices having a PCI-x socket, I tend to compile
as modules most of the new stuff I'm presented with from "make oldconfig".

If there's anything particular anyone wants adding as a kernel module, I
can add it in for -current going forwards.