Patent ID: 8261257

Claim:
A host system comprising: an operating system segmented into (i) a user space, and (ii) a kernel space, wherein the operating system is configured to, via a process file system, process files stored in the kernel space based on a plurality of commands of the process file system, wherein the files comprise a firmware file, wherein the firmware file is stored in the user space, wherein access to the firmware file is restricted, and wherein the kernel space comprises a memory; and a device driver of a hardware device, wherein the device driver (i) is in the kernel space and (ii) is unable to directly download the firmware file from the user space to the memory due to the restriction on the access to the firmware file, wherein the device driver is configured to communicate with the process file system to download the firmware file, wherein the hardware device is separate from the operating system, and wherein the device driver is configured to use (i) each of the plurality of commands to download the firmware file from the user space to the memory, and (ii) one of the plurality of commands to download the firmware file from the memory to the hardware device, wherein a number of download cycles performed by the device driver during the download of the firmware file from the user space to the memory is based on a number of blocks of data remaining in the user space and not already downloaded from the user space to the memory, and wherein during each of the download cycles, the device driver is configured to: transfer a first one of the blocks of data a first segment of the memory, wherein the first one of the blocks of data is transferred from the user space to the first segment during a first one of the download cycles, wherein the first one of the blocks of data is transferred from a second segment of the memory to the first segment during a second one of the download cycles subsequent to the first one of the download cycles, and wherein the second segment stores a combined block of data, transfer a second one of the blocks of data from the user space to the second segment of the memory, copy the first one of the blocks of data into the second segment, and append the first one of the blocks of data to the second one of the blocks of data to from the combined block of data in the second segment, wherein the second one of the blocks of data sequentially follows the first one of the blocks of data in the second segment.