firmware discussion

Hello to all,

I would like to introduce myself. My name is Jan Sucan. I am from 
Slovakia and I study in Prague. I have done some simpler embedded 
systems programming in the past and I am very interested in kernel-level 
programming.

I would like to work on modifying firmware framework for loading files 
from userland.

I have added experimental support to subr_firmware.c for reading a 
firmware data using fp_open() from userland and registering it with 
firmware_register().

I think of implementing a mapping of firmware names to file paths using 
sysctl, as Johannes Hofmann suggested back then in May 2010. This 
mapping would take precedence over loading the firmware modules, so 
transition to the new way of loading firmware data could be gradual.

I would like to ask for your opinions and suggestions.

Thanks,
Jan