[U-Boot] QE firmware/microcode handling
Timur Tabi
timur at freescale.com
Thu Sep 20 17:22:21 CEST 2012
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.
--
Timur Tabi
Linux kernel developer at Freescale
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