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

[Peter Robinson]

On Thu, Mar 8, 2012 at 3:03 PM, Tom Callaway <tcallawa at 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 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?

Yes, I believe so.

Peter