[U-Boot] Licensing Question on ARM Semihosting Code

Darwin Rambo drambo at broadcom.com
Thu Mar 6 21:43:50 CET 2014


On 14-02-28 10:49 AM, Tom Rini wrote:
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> On 02/28/2014 01:18 PM, Darwin Rambo wrote:
>> Given the ARM header below, is this code possible to put into
>> u-boot?
>>
>> For reference, I see this discussion below. 
>> http://lists.denx.de/pipermail/u-boot/2011-November/110884.html
>>
>> If this is not acceptable, presumably due to the "All rights
>> reserved" and "Redistribution in binary form..." clauses below, we
>> could try to find an alternative implementation that is GPL2.0+
>> licensed or rewrite the parts we need from scratch.
>>
>> Any suggestions you have would be most welcome. Thanks.
> 
> So, that particular discussion was about fastboot, and in that
> particular case everything is OK, in the long run (I poked TI's
> lawyers about that).  We're just missing a clean design version being
> ported and I know of a few groups / companies leaning on another
> entity to do so.
> 
> But with your particular quoted header, I think we cannot use it as it
> puts restrictions on the binary redistribution as well.

Thanks Tom. If we were to create a small bit of arm-specific semihosting
code without the licensing restrictions, and it were acceptable to the
maintainers to upstream, would it best live in
u-boot/arch/arm/lib/semihosting.c or in u-boot/lib/semihosting.c? I was
thinking that arch/arm/lib might be the better place for it, especially
since it can support both armv7 and armv8 platforms. The semihosting.h
file might live in arch/arm/include/asm?

BTW the proposal for this is to be able to use the ARM Trusted Firmware
(ATF) to load the various ATF images, plus u-boot, which can then load
the kernel/ramdisk/dtb from a standard arm board file using semihosting,
and then launch the kernel without a bootwrapper. This gives us a more
realistic boot sequence. Thanks!

Regards,
Darwin

> 
> - -- 
> Tom
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