From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Timur Tabi Date: Thu, 20 Sep 2012 10:22:21 -0500 Subject: [U-Boot] QE firmware/microcode handling In-Reply-To: <505AE6C3.5080708@keymile.com> References: <505AE6C3.5080708@keymile.com> Message-ID: <505B34AD.7070801@freescale.com> List-Id: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: u-boot@lists.denx.de Gerlando Falauto wrote: > Hi everyone, > > following up Timur's patch on QE microcode: > > http://marc.info/?l=u-boot&m=132197537730440&w=2 > > I was wondering, would it make any sense to *embed* QE's firmware within > u-boot image itself? There are three problems: 1) A lot of U-Boot images are already very close to the 512KB limit. We often have to disable features in U-Boot to get it to build properly. An additional 64KB would be prohibitive. 2) The firmware license is not exactly GPL-compatible. The firmware files themselves are freely distributable, but the source code is closed. I'm not sure how that would work in a GPL U-Boot. 3) For Fman, at least, we often update the firmware after the board ships, which means you would need to update U-Boot to get a new firmware. So no one might actually use this feature because they're afraid they won't be able to update the firmware. If you can do it, go ahead. I would approve a patch that adds the ability to inject a firmware binary into u-boot.bin, provided it's controlled via a build or CONFIG_SYS_xxx option. -- Timur Tabi Linux kernel developer at Freescale