Hello Robert,
in message 20051115183458.GX1099@pengutronix.de you wrote:
I have a board which uses a softcore ethernet chip, so before for example U-Boot is able to do networking some binary firmware has to be loaded into the device.
What's the preferred method to do this? I didn't find other boards in the U-Boot code but maybe missed something.
See for example the FPGA support code which does something similar - load some images into a FPGA.
Seen from a technical point of view it would be the best solution to just link the firmware somewhere into the U-Boot image, but I would be
I'm not sure if this is really the best solution; it may be a good thing to have the firmware image separated and be able to replace it without needing to replace U-boot.
interested how this is generally seen wrt. GPL issues. I don't think
My opinion is that linking is linking, and code is code. But I am not a lawyer (Thank goodness!). There are nearly twenty boards which include some binary firmware images (search for "fpgadata.c" files), but in my (limited( understanding this is just a hardware description, not code. Now "binary firmware" may be something different. It sounds very much like code to me.
Which license is used for this firmware?
that this creates a derivative work, taken that it is just being bit-banged into the hardware by some GPL code, which is not different
Unless somebody with a better understanding of the legal aspects ex- plains to me that I'm wrong (and why), then I will not complain about hardware definitions like FPGA images; but code (even for a different CPU) should be GPLed.
Just providing a loader that loads the image from some external storage is IMHO the better approach anyway.
from what the Linux firmware interface does, but anyway. It has to be located somehow, and spending another flash sector just for some 40KiB would be uggly.
This depends on your sector size ;-) Also, you can locate the image in one of your file system images und use U-Boot to laod it - we have support for FAT/VFAT, ext2, JFFS2, cramfs, and reiser - you should find something that matches your setup.
Best regards,
Wolfgang Denk