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

[Gordan Bobic]

Tom Callaway 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?

My guess is that at least in cases where the primary boot loader is 
closed, you will still need it (Tegra's aboot comes to mind). If you 
look at uboot, that does a lot of low-level initialization, frequently 
re-using the code from the kernel. I don't see all of that functionality 
making it into grub.

Gordan