[U-Boot] [PATCH 0/9] EFI payload / application support

Tom Rini trini at konsulko.com
Fri Dec 25 17:50:18 CET 2015


On Fri, Dec 25, 2015 at 09:53:22AM +0100, Alexander Graf wrote:
> 
> 
> On 25.12.15 04:29, Tom Rini wrote:
> > On Tue, Dec 22, 2015 at 02:57:47PM +0100, Alexander Graf wrote:
> > 
> >> This is my Christmas present for my openSUSE friends :).
> >>
> >> U-Boot is a great project for embedded devices. However, convincing
> >> everyone involved that only for "a few oddball ARM devices" we need to
> >> support different configuration formats from grub2 when all other platforms
> >> (PPC, System Z, x86) are standardized on a single format is a nightmare.
> >>
> >> So we started to explore alternatives. At first, people tried to get
> >> grub2 running using the u-boot api interface. However, FWIW that one
> >> doesn't support relocations, so you need to know where to link grub2 to
> >> at compile time. It also seems to be broken more often than not. And on
> >> top of it all, it's a one-off interface, so yet another thing to maintain.
> >>
> >> That led to a nifty idea. What if we can just implement the EFI application
> >> protocol on top of U-Boot? Then we could compile a single grub2 binary for
> >> uEFI based systems and U-Boot based systems and as soon as that one's loaded,
> >> everything looks and feels (almost) the same.
> >>
> >> This patch set is the result of pursuing this endeavor.
> > 
> > So, I owe the whole codebase a real review.  My very quick question
> > however is, aside from what you had to borrow from wine, can you license
> > everything else as GPL v2 or later rather than LGPL?
> 
> I'm personally a pretty big fan of the LGPL, since it's a very
> reasonable compromise between closed and open source IMHO ;).
> 
> Is there a particular reason you're asking for this? LGPL code is fully
> compatible with GPL code and the resulting binary would be GPL anyway
> because FWIW you can't compile U-Boot without GPL code inside.

The general rules for U-Boot code are to be GPL v2 or later.  U-Boot is
(and always will be) a GPL v2 only project as there's simply too much
Linux kernel code that we want to leverage.  We do make special
exceptions at times for very good reasons (like include/android_image.h
is the authorative BSD-2 clause copy of that information) and I've even
told some companies that for crypto-auth-sensitive stuff they can do GPL
v2 only in their submission (again, due to U-Boot always being a v2 only
project).

So, I'm not gonig to reject the EFI loader code if you say no, you won't
re-license it as GPL v2 (or v2 and later) but I'd really appreciate it.
Thanks!

-- 
Tom
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