Gerlando Falauto wrote:
Hi everyone,
following up Timur's patch on QE microcode:
http://marc.info/?l=u-boot&m=132197537730440&w=2
I was wondering, would it make any sense to *embed* QE's firmware within u-boot image itself?
There are three problems:
1) A lot of U-Boot images are already very close to the 512KB limit. We often have to disable features in U-Boot to get it to build properly. An additional 64KB would be prohibitive.
2) The firmware license is not exactly GPL-compatible. The firmware files themselves are freely distributable, but the source code is closed. I'm not sure how that would work in a GPL U-Boot.
3) For Fman, at least, we often update the firmware after the board ships, which means you would need to update U-Boot to get a new firmware. So no one might actually use this feature because they're afraid they won't be able to update the firmware.
If you can do it, go ahead. I would approve a patch that adds the ability to inject a firmware binary into u-boot.bin, provided it's controlled via a build or CONFIG_SYS_xxx option.