[PATCH 0/8] optimize the firmware loading process

[Ferruh Yigit]

On 1/23/2024 1:46 AM, Chaoyong He wrote:
> 
> 
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Ferruh Yigit <ferruh.yigit at amd.com>
>> Sent: Monday, January 22, 2024 11:09 PM
>> To: Chaoyong He <chaoyong.he at corigine.com>; dev at dpdk.org
>> Cc: oss-drivers <oss-drivers at corigine.com>
>> Subject: Re: [PATCH 0/8] optimize the firmware loading process
>>
>> On 1/15/2024 2:54 AM, Chaoyong He wrote:
>>> This patch series aims to speedup the DPDK application start by
>>> optimize the firmware loading process in sereval places.
>>> We also simplify the port name in multiple PF firmware case to make
>>> the customer happy.
>>>
>>
>> <...>
>>
>>>   net/nfp: add the elf module
>>>   net/nfp: reload the firmware only when firmware changed
>>
>> Above commit adds elf parser capability and second one loads firmware when
>> build time is different.
>>
>> I can see this is an optimization effort, to understand FW status before loading
>> FW, but relying on build time seems fragile. Does it help to add a new section
>> to store version information and evaluate based on this information?
>>
> 
> We have a branch of firmware (several app type combined with NFD3/NFDk) with the same version information(monthly publish),
> so the version information can't help us, because we can't distinguish among them.
> 
> But the build time is different for every firmware, and that's the reason we choose it.
> 

If version is same although FW itself is different, isn't this problem
on its own? Perhaps an additional field is required in version syntax.