On Mon, 2018-08-27 at 17:04 -0700, Felix Manlunas wrote: > On Mon, Aug 27, 2018 at 05:01:10PM +0200, Florian Weimer wrote: > > liquidio/lio_23xx_vsw.bin contains a compiled MIPS Linux kernel: > > > > $ tail --bytes=+1313 liquidio/lio_23xx_vsw.bin > elf > > $ readelf -aW elf > > […] > > [ 6] __ksymtab PROGBITS ffffffff80e495f8 64a5f8 00d130 > > 00 A 0 0 8 > > [ 7] __ksymtab_gpl PROGBITS ffffffff80e56728 657728 008400 > > 00 A 0 0 8 > > [ 8] __ksymtab_strings PROGBITS ffffffff80e5eb28 65fb28 018868 > > 00 A 0 0 1 > > […] > > Symbol table '.symtab' contains 1349 entries: > > Num: Value Size Type Bind Vis Ndx Name > > 0: 0000000000000000 0 NOTYPE LOCAL DEFAULT UND > > 1: 0000000000000000 0 FILE LOCAL DEFAULT ABS > > arch/mips/kernel/head.o > > 2: 0000000000000000 0 FILE LOCAL DEFAULT ABS init/main.c > > 3: 0000000000000000 0 FILE LOCAL DEFAULT ABS > > include/linux/types.h > > […] > > > > Yet there is no corresponding source provided, and LICENCE.cavium lacks > > the required notices. > > > > Thanks, > > Florian > > Cavium apologizes for the oversight. Cavium has been advertising the > appropriate license terms including the existence of GPL in the firmware > in our outbox releases. We will update the license terms in LICENCE.cavium > in our upstream contribution in collaboration with our legal team.
Everything added to linux-firmware.git needs to be safe for Linux distributions to redistribute. (There are some ancient firmware images with unclear licensing, but we don't want to add any more.) My understanding is that GPL v2 requires that commercial distributors either provide the complete and corresponding source alongside the binaries, or include a written offer to provide it later. They *cannot* simply point to your offer to do this (only non-commercial distributors can do that). So the source needs to be published too. Adding the complete Linux kernel source code to linux-firmware.git doesn't seem like a sensible step, so maybe this particular firmware needs to live elsewhere. Ben. -- Ben Hutchings For every complex problem there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
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