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

[Peter Robinson]

On Thu, Mar 8, 2012 at 3:33 PM, Tom Callaway <tcallawa at redhat.com> wrote:
> On 03/08/2012 10:16 AM, Peter Robinson wrote:
>
>> In some cases they do and we don't need to worry about it, in other
>> cases like the PandaBoard they're likely just being too tight to put a
>> flash chip on the board to hold the FW/BIOS so you have to have a
>> small partition at the beginning of the SD to hold it and the SoC
>> basically searches for a location that is set by pin combinations for
>> the SoC boot code off serial/mmc/usb,
>
> So, the existing firmware exception is tightly worded, it says:
>
> "The files must be necessary for the functionality of open source code
> being included in Fedora."
>
> I'm not sure this BIOS/FW code actually meets that criteria, can you
> make that case?

Without these files the device will no boot and there is no Fedora on
them? These aren't say files for flashing Fedora onto the device such
as an Android style updater utility. These initialise the device's HW
and then load the kernel into memory so the OS can boot. By including
them it will allow us to integrate the writing of the SD cards with
tools like livecd-tools (or equivalent) to ease the creation of images
for use. Eg the MLO file needs to be the very first file on the vfat
partition in the first block of the filesystem otherwise it just won't
boot.

Peter