Re: [fedora-arm] ARM and shipping of various binary firmware / boot bits
Tom Callaway wrote:
On 03/08/2012 10:04 AM, Peter Robinson wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 8, 2012 at 3:03 PM, Tom Callaway <tcallawa(a)redhat.com> wrote:
>> On 03/08/2012 09:52 AM, Peter Robinson wrote:
>>> On Thu, Mar 8, 2012 at 2:42 PM, Tom Callaway <tcallawa(a)redhat.com>
wrote:
>>>> On 03/07/2012 07:14 PM, Peter Robinson wrote:
>>>>> Hey spot,
>>>>>
>>>>> On our weekly call today we discussed the always fun bit of binary
>>>>> blobs. ARM has the usual wireless and associated blobs most of which
i
>>>>> think are already upstream (and already in Fedora).
>>>>>
>>>>> The bits that came up is uboot, MLO (X-Loader) [1] and what ever
some
>>>>> of the other devices use such as the Raspberry Pi. In the first
>>>>> example the source code is available but forked from upstream, in
the
>>>>> later it's a binary blob not that dissimilar presumably to a
wifi
>>>>> firmware. For the binary blobs is the process the same as per wifi
or
>>>>> any other binary? What about the MLO/uboot, is it enough to package
>>>>> the binaries and include details in COPYING/spec where the source
code
>>>>> is?
>>>>>
>>>>> I'm sure there's some other cases I've not thought of
that you might
>>>>> be aware of too. Can you advise of the best and easiest way for us
to
>>>>> deal with these?
>>>> We need to review each of the binary firmware items individually. Just
>>>> open review request tickets and block FE-Legal immediately.
>>>>
>>>> As for uboot, is there any good reason not to build from the available
>>>> source code? And MLO? I'm not sure we can consider a bootloader to
be
>>>> firmware. That one might not be able to go into Fedora.
>>> Well we probably might well be able to but there's dozens of branches
>>> and forks etc for initiated every different SOC in their millions of
>>> different configurations, it's closer to a BIOS than a bootloader I
>>> believe, Linaro is in the process of adding grub2 support for ARM so
>>> grub will eventually run as a bootloader just like on x86.
>> In that situation, will we still need the uboot/MLO stuff?
> Yes, I believe so.
Okay, so I'm admittedly a bit lost here, because we don't normally ship
BIOS code for any other platform (apart from qemu). Why is ARM different
in that regard? Why don't the vendors deliver BIOS (or equivalent)?
ARM SoCs come from a completely different, unstandardised background,
unlike x86. This is the same reason why you cannot have a kernel for one
SoC booting on another (at least not at the moment).
Linaro are trying to converge the basic features toward a standard that
will allow a common kernel to boot on multiple SoCs, but this is not
going to happen overnight.
Gordan