On Fri, Jan 15, 2016 at 04:00:21AM +0100, Alexander Graf wrote:
On 25.12.15 17:50, Tom Rini wrote:
On Fri, Dec 25, 2015 at 09:53:22AM +0100, Alexander Graf wrote:
On 25.12.15 04:29, Tom Rini wrote:
On Tue, Dec 22, 2015 at 02:57:47PM +0100, Alexander Graf wrote:
This is my Christmas present for my openSUSE friends :).
U-Boot is a great project for embedded devices. However, convincing everyone involved that only for "a few oddball ARM devices" we need to support different configuration formats from grub2 when all other platforms (PPC, System Z, x86) are standardized on a single format is a nightmare.
So we started to explore alternatives. At first, people tried to get grub2 running using the u-boot api interface. However, FWIW that one doesn't support relocations, so you need to know where to link grub2 to at compile time. It also seems to be broken more often than not. And on top of it all, it's a one-off interface, so yet another thing to maintain.
That led to a nifty idea. What if we can just implement the EFI application protocol on top of U-Boot? Then we could compile a single grub2 binary for uEFI based systems and U-Boot based systems and as soon as that one's loaded, everything looks and feels (almost) the same.
This patch set is the result of pursuing this endeavor.
So, I owe the whole codebase a real review. My very quick question however is, aside from what you had to borrow from wine, can you license everything else as GPL v2 or later rather than LGPL?
I'm personally a pretty big fan of the LGPL, since it's a very reasonable compromise between closed and open source IMHO ;).
Is there a particular reason you're asking for this? LGPL code is fully compatible with GPL code and the resulting binary would be GPL anyway because FWIW you can't compile U-Boot without GPL code inside.
The general rules for U-Boot code are to be GPL v2 or later. U-Boot is (and always will be) a GPL v2 only project as there's simply too much Linux kernel code that we want to leverage. We do make special exceptions at times for very good reasons (like include/android_image.h is the authorative BSD-2 clause copy of that information) and I've even told some companies that for crypto-auth-sensitive stuff they can do GPL v2 only in their submission (again, due to U-Boot always being a v2 only project).
So, I'm not gonig to reject the EFI loader code if you say no, you won't re-license it as GPL v2 (or v2 and later) but I'd really appreciate it. Thanks!
I've just read up and apparently it's completely legal and allowed to simply remove the LGPL (2.1+) boilerplate from a file and instead put a GPL (2.0+) one on it, even if you didn't write the code.
Legal and good idea don't always match up :)
So even if I had insisted to stick to LGPL v2.1+, you could've just written a patch to change it after the fact ;).
But since everyone seems to be far more happy with GPL rather than LGPL, I've spared you that patch and changed the headers myself now.
Thanks, I appreciate it!