Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH 0/2] Firmware blob and git submodule for Sam460ex

[David Gibson <david@gibson.dropbear.id.au>]

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On Wed, Feb 21, 2018 at 06:33:42PM +0000, Peter Maydell wrote:
> On 21 February 2018 at 17:06, BALATON Zoltan <balaton@eik.bme.hu> wrote:
> > It's not that upstream u-boot has abandoned board support (it only removed
> > support for the PPC440 CPU it once had). The board itself never had support
> > in upstream u-boot, it only exists in vendor's fork which is the reason we
> > need a separate source and cannot use upstream u-boot source we already
> > have.
> >
> > In my opinion we don't aim to take on support for this board in u-boot, we
> > only need to include the firmware binary for the emulation to be useful
> > which then requires us to also include the source for the GPL it's licensed
> > under. I've also found a few bugs in the firmware which I've fixed but apart
> > from such occasional bug fixes when needed I don't expect to take over
> > support for the board from the hardware vendor so this source is only so we
> > can include the firmware binary which is needed for the board emulation.
> > Does this answer your concerns?
> 
> We have lots of boards we don't ship firmware blobs for and
> which we expect the users to provide the guest code for
> if they're going to use them. If we had a git submodule
> for every random dev board model that needs some hardware
> vendor's BSP and bootloader we'd probably have 50 submodules...
> 
> Which isn't to say I'm definitely against this -- I'm just
> trying to figure out where we should draw the line of
> "these bits of guest code we build for you and ship with
> QEMU" versus "we provide the model of the hardware for you
> to run whatever guest code you happen to have".

So, I encouraged Zoltan to attempt this because I thought boards
without suitable firmware blobs were the exception.  If they're common
it's probably fine as is.

-- 
David Gibson			| I'll have my music baroque, and my code
david AT gibson.dropbear.id.au	| minimalist, thank you.  NOT _the_ _other_
				| _way_ _around_!
http://www.ozlabs.org/~dgibson

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