Chris Packham wrote:
Good point. I got the firmware out of the SDK that came with our P2041RDB. I believe the intent was that the Fman microcode is written to a reserved flash block and downloaded to the frame manager by the OS when needed. As a Freescale customer I would actually prefer to have the source released under the GPL and build everything into the u-boot image.
For the record, Freescale considers embedding Fman or QE microcode into a "GPL binary" (e.g. a compiled U-boot or Linux image) to be a GPL violation. I'm sure there might be some linker or compiler tricks that some people would say are not GPL violations, but I'm not going to debate any of that. I'm just stating what our official position is.
Having said that, I do realize that Freescale still ships some QE firmware binaries as C header/source files that are supposed to be #included into customer code. Unfortunately, not all Freescale developers have gotten the message.