On Thu, Mar 25, 2010 at 6:53 PM, M. Warner Losh <i...@bsdimp.com> wrote:
> Most !linux systems are not GPL'd. They are BSDL, primarily, or some > private license between seller and buyer. In any event, other OSes > likely won't have the GPL issue. You're probably right. > But I'm confused. If you can't distribute the binary firmware, why > can you distribute the hex dump of the firmware? We can distribute the binary firmware. We just can't embed it in the Linux kernel, since it's not GPL. So it needs to be delivered to the kernel at boot time via a non-GPL mechanism. The device tree is one option. An initrd is another. The problem Freescale has is that modifying our BSP to use an initrd is not a trivial task, and it's a lot more complicated than using the device tree. For example, there's the possibility that U-Boot and Linux will use different microcode binaries, and it also means that the initrd becomes SOC-specific. -- Timur Tabi Linux kernel developer at Freescale _______________________________________________ Linuxppc-dev mailing list Linuxppc-dev@lists.ozlabs.org https://lists.ozlabs.org/listinfo/linuxppc-dev
