[U-Boot] [EXT] Re: Cavium/Marvell Octeon Support

[Wolfgang Denk]

Dear Aaron,

In message <2609392.0ByMiX4J6F at flash> you wrote:
>
> U-Boot OS might be fun for people writing applications where they want bare 
> metal (i.e. hard real-time), though that's already provided with the API and 
> examples.

Urgh... no!!! U-Boot is definitely *not* suitable for any kind of
real-time tasks.  By design it implements strict single-tasking with
usally polling hardware access only.  No multi-tasking, no
interrupts, no locking, no timers, nothing...

> You can't get much more arms length than that except perhaps requiring U-Boot 
> to use an interrupt. They are by just about any definition, completely 
> separate binaries. I'm no lawyer, but reading the GPL FAQ I think we fall well 
> within the arms length separation.

Definitely not.  You could not implement any of this without heavily
relyin on and deriving from internal interfaces of U-Boot which are
not exported for non-GPL use.


Best regards,

Wolfgang Denk

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