[U-Boot] [PATCH] SBx81CFC960: embed Fman microcode in the bootloader

[Chris Packham]

On 09/22/2012 03:58 AM, Wolfgang Denk wrote:
> Dear judge.packham at gmail.com,
> 
> In message <1348216335-18105-1-git-send-email-judge.packham at gmail.com> you wrote:
>> From: Chris Packham <judge.packham at gmail.com>
>>
>> Instead of storing the mircocode in a separate flash block simply embed
>> the image as C code array of bytes.
> 
> What exactly is the licensing of this code?

Good point. I got the firmware out of the SDK that came with our
P2041RDB. I believe the intent was that the Fman microcode is written to
a reserved flash block and downloaded to the frame manager by the OS
when needed. As a Freescale customer I would actually prefer to have the
source released under the GPL and build everything into the u-boot image.

> Would it not have to be GPL compatible to "link" it in such a way,
> which in turn would require the source code and the tools to build
> it ?

Well I took one law paper at university and quickly decided to major in
computer science instead so I am entirely unqualified to comment :).
That being said it probably depends on the definition of "link". No code
is actually being called directly from u-boot, it's just a convenient
transportation mechanism. Still there are statements in the GPL about
what constitutes distributing the code, someone more qualified can
tackle that.

I can understand why for u-boot this might be a gray area. Writing
firmware blobs to a flash block somewhere is a solution that avoids any
problems and makes my patch unsuitable/unnecessary.