Re: RTL8159 firmware

[Jan Hendrik Farr <kernel@jfarr.cc>]

On 01 21:29:20, Andrew Lunn wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 01, 2026 at 07:24:13PM +0200, Birger Koblitz wrote:
> > Hi Jan,
> > 
> > On 7/1/26 19:13, Jan Hendrik Farr wrote:
> > > Hi Birger,
> > > 
> > > it looks like the firmware file rtl_nic/rtl8159-1.fw isn't in linux-firmware yet.
> > > Could you send it for people to potentially test?
> > > 
> > > Jan
> > > 
> > The code to create the binary firmware file is at:
> > https://gitlab.com/koblitz-rtlnic/rtlnic_fw
> > But I cannot submit the firmware itself to linux-firmware, as the sourcecode from
> > which the binary data is extracted is published by Realtek under the GPL.
> 
> The obvious work around is to not convert it to binary.
> 
> 8152.c has a clear GPL-2.0 header. So you can edit that file, extract
> the two arrays, and it would still be GPL. You can make the firmware
> loader in the driver parse the ASCII array as it is. It also looks
> like you can .xz or .zst compress it, and the kernel
> _request_firmware() will handle the decompression for you.
> 

Not a GPL expert, but aren't those "binary" arrays in 8152.c a GPL violation?
Unless they created them directly. But I "highly suspect" they are
compiled from some source. They have to provide the "preferred form for
modification"

Jan