On Thursday 10 May 2007, Jonathan Pratt wrote:
I was not aware of the project. They merely point out that it's a necessary evil. The Intel redistribution restrictions seem rather draconian, however.
I'm not sure about the conflict with u-boot (GPL), however, and whether the issues are more than philosophical.
You can include the NPE binary into U-Boot as you did, but this violates the GPL and therefore you are not allowed to ship products using this resulting image.
The best solution for this problem right now, if to not included the NPE binary in the U-Boot build process, but program it into a separate FLASH sector, and let the NPE ethernet driver load the NPE's with the binary from this location. This way we don't have link the NPE binary into the U-Boot image. Unfortunately nobody found the time to implement this solution till now.
And furthermore, it would be very desireable to drop the current NPE U-Boot ethernet driver implementation based on the original Intel code with the complex and ugly Intel access library completely, and re-implement the driver based on the new Linux IXP4xx NPE ethernet drivers. There are currently 2 completely new drivers without the Intel access library which will result in lower memory footprint and much less and cleaner code.
Patches welcome! :-)
Best regards, Stefan
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