From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Chris Packham Date: Sat, 22 Sep 2012 21:44:37 +1200 Subject: [U-Boot] [PATCH] SBx81CFC960: embed Fman microcode in the bootloader In-Reply-To: <20120921155810.12ABB203200@gemini.denx.de> References: <505B34AD.7070801@freescale.com> <1348216335-18105-1-git-send-email-judge.packham@gmail.com> <20120921155810.12ABB203200@gemini.denx.de> Message-ID: <505D8885.5010000@gmail.com> List-Id: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: u-boot@lists.denx.de On 09/22/2012 03:58 AM, Wolfgang Denk wrote: > Dear judge.packham at gmail.com, > > In message <1348216335-18105-1-git-send-email-judge.packham@gmail.com> you wrote: >> From: Chris Packham >> >> Instead of storing the mircocode in a separate flash block simply embed >> the image as C code array of bytes. > > What exactly is the licensing of this code? Good point. I got the firmware out of the SDK that came with our P2041RDB. I believe the intent was that the Fman microcode is written to a reserved flash block and downloaded to the frame manager by the OS when needed. As a Freescale customer I would actually prefer to have the source released under the GPL and build everything into the u-boot image. > Would it not have to be GPL compatible to "link" it in such a way, > which in turn would require the source code and the tools to build > it ? Well I took one law paper at university and quickly decided to major in computer science instead so I am entirely unqualified to comment :). That being said it probably depends on the definition of "link". No code is actually being called directly from u-boot, it's just a convenient transportation mechanism. Still there are statements in the GPL about what constitutes distributing the code, someone more qualified can tackle that. I can understand why for u-boot this might be a gray area. Writing firmware blobs to a flash block somewhere is a solution that avoids any problems and makes my patch unsuitable/unnecessary.