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

[Alexander Graf]

On 25.12.15 17:50, Tom Rini wrote:
> 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!

I've just read up and apparently it's completely legal and allowed to
simply remove the LGPL (2.1+) boilerplate from a file and instead put a
GPL (2.0+) one on it, even if you didn't write the code.

So even if I had insisted to stick to LGPL v2.1+, you could've just
written a patch to change it after the fact ;).

But since everyone seems to be far more happy with GPL rather than LGPL,
I've spared you that patch and changed the headers myself now.


Alex