firmware: provide infrastructure to make fw caching optional

Some low memory systems with complex peripherals cannot afford to have
the relatively large firmware images taking up valuable memory during
suspend and resume.  Change the internal implementation of
firmware_class to disallow caching based on a configurable option.  In
the near future, variants of request_firmware will take advantage of
this feature.

Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/[email protected]
[[email protected]: Drop firmware_desc design and use flags]
Signed-off-by: Vikram Mulukutla <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Stephen Boyd <[email protected]>
Cc: Mimi Zohar <[email protected]>
Cc: Mark Brown <[email protected]>
Cc: Ming Lei <[email protected]>
Cc: Greg Kroah-Hartman <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <[email protected]>

Author: Vikram Mulukutla

drivers/base/firmware_class.c

@@ -112,6 +112,7 @@ static inline long firmware_loading_timeout(void)
 #define FW_OPT_FALLBACK		0
 #endif
 #define FW_OPT_NO_WARN	(1U << 3)
+#define FW_OPT_NOCACHE	(1U << 4)
 
 struct firmware_cache {
 	/* firmware_buf instance will be added into the below list */
@@ -1065,14 +1066,16 @@ static int assign_firmware_buf(struct firmware *fw, struct device *device,
 	 * should be fixed in devres or driver core.
 	 */
 	/* don't cache firmware handled without uevent */
-	if (device && (opt_flags & FW_OPT_UEVENT))
+	if (device && (opt_flags & FW_OPT_UEVENT) &&
+	    !(opt_flags & FW_OPT_NOCACHE))
 		fw_add_devm_name(device, buf->fw_id);
 
 	/*
 	 * After caching firmware image is started, let it piggyback
 	 * on request firmware.
 	 */
-	if (buf->fwc->state == FW_LOADER_START_CACHE) {
+	if (!(opt_flags & FW_OPT_NOCACHE) &&
+	    buf->fwc->state == FW_LOADER_START_CACHE) {
 		if (fw_cache_piggyback_on_request(buf->fw_id))
 			kref_get(&buf->ref);
 	}