Hi,
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.
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 interested how this is generally seen wrt. GPL issues. I don't think 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 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.
Robert