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

[Peter Robinson]

On Thu, Mar 8, 2012 at 4:22 PM, Tom Callaway <tcallawa at redhat.com> wrote:
> On 03/08/2012 10:55 AM, Peter Robinson wrote:
>> 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.
>
> I think you're both missing the point here. The intent of that clause
> was to say that Firmware $FOO is necessary for Free Software $BAR to work.

No, I understand that. RAID Controller X won't work if firmware Y
isn't included. eg the qLogic stuff.

> Free Software $BAR works fine on x86 without Firmware $FOO. It works
> fine on some ARM systems that do not need Firmware $FOO. In fact, $BAR
> doesn't have any knowledge of $FOO whatsoever. So, to claim that $FOO is
> "necessary for the functionality of open source code being included in
> Fedora", well, that's not right. It doesn't say "must be necessary to
> boot some hardware".

It is necessary, I don't get your point here.

> I don't think we want to be packaging up system BIOSes (or their
> equivalent). Our firmware exception is intended _only_ to enable FOSS
> code that wouldn't work without it.

Well the Fedora OS won't work without it. Yes, you could go and get it
separately and make it work but then the same goes for all wifi
firmwares as well. I don't see how a firmware blob required to boot
the device is any different from say a qLogic FC modile or any of the
wifi modules.

> I realize that it would be easier to have these files packaged so that
> you could make easy images, but I just don't think this is in keeping
> with the Free Software goals of Fedora.

I don't see how it's any different to the other firmwares though
either, they are NOT "support" utilities to be able to flash devices.

> I think you're going to have to ask the Board whether they wish to
> extend the Firmware exception to explicitly include packaging of
> non-free BIOS files (or BIOS-like files). I'm not willing to make that
> call (and I'm not sure I support it).

They are free, they're also open source. You didn't read the link I
posted in my first mail. The source is all there to be able to build
it BUT it's not supported by the device manufacturers if you do that
so we would like to include the manufacturers code, we could even
include it in the src.rpm. It's more open than just about any Wifi
firmware we ship or any of the files included in the linux-firmware
package.

Peter