https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=329511 and https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=240105 both appear to address failure of the kernel to load firmware in the initrd phase of system booting. I can confirm that the second (aic94xx) bug, although it results in a failure during boot, if followed by rmmod aic94xx and then modprobe aic94xx results in firmware being properly loaded and the system able to make use of disks attached to the controller. I can also state that the nash find command locates the proper firmware file within the initrd file system even though the kernel fails to locate it. This takes place on a x86_64 system with both kernel-2.6.23.1-49.fc8 and kernel-2.6.23.8-63.fc8 and mkinitrd-6.0.19-4.fc8 (I modified mkinitrd to include the nash find command.) My question is: is firmware loading working for anyone with recent Fedora kernels or is there some sort of bug in the kernel firmware routines exercised only by an initrd file system?