[fedora-arm] ARM and shipping of various binary firmware / boot bits

[Tom Callaway]

On 03/08/2012 09:52 AM, Peter Robinson wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 8, 2012 at 2:42 PM, Tom Callaway <tcallawa at 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?

~tom

==
Fedora Project