From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 30008 invoked by alias); 15 Feb 2011 21:56:46 -0000 Received: (qmail 30000 invoked by uid 22791); 15 Feb 2011 21:56:45 -0000 X-SWARE-Spam-Status: No, hits=-0.2 required=5.0 tests=AWL,BAYES_00,DKIM_ADSP_CUSTOM_MED,FREEMAIL_FROM,NML_ADSP_CUSTOM_MED,SPF_NEUTRAL,T_TO_NO_BRKTS_FREEMAIL X-Spam-Check-By: sourceware.org Received: from smtp.gentoo.org (HELO smtp.gentoo.org) (140.211.166.183) by sourceware.org (qpsmtpd/0.43rc1) with ESMTP; Tue, 15 Feb 2011 21:56:38 +0000 Received: from vapier.localnet (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by smtp.gentoo.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id EFEE21B405A; Tue, 15 Feb 2011 21:56:36 +0000 (UTC) From: Mike Frysinger To: gdb-patches@sourceware.org Subject: Re: [PATCH v3] sim: bfin: new port Date: Wed, 16 Feb 2011 01:34:00 -0000 User-Agent: KMail/1.13.5 (Linux/2.6.37; KDE/4.5.5; x86_64; ; ) Cc: Pedro Alves References: <201011152039.08285.vapier@gentoo.org> <201102141710.54603.vapier@gmail.com> <201102151556.55943.pedro@codesourcery.com> In-Reply-To: <201102151556.55943.pedro@codesourcery.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: Text/Plain; charset="iso-8859-15" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-Id: <201102151656.34375.vapier@gmail.com> Mailing-List: contact gdb-patches-help@sourceware.org; run by ezmlm Precedence: bulk List-Id: List-Subscribe: List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: , Sender: gdb-patches-owner@sourceware.org X-SW-Source: 2011-02/txt/msg00347.txt.bz2 On Tuesday, February 15, 2011 10:56:55 Pedro Alves wrote: > On Tuesday 15 February 2011 22:10:54, Mike Frysinger wrote: > > > What kind of rom, and what kind of hardware? > > > > it's the on-chip rom that exists on all Blackfin parts. usually it's > > used for bootstrapping a part, but it also has helper functions which > > are sometimes used at runtime by the boot loader (i.e. u-boot). > > > > > What tool does one use to extract this rom? > > > > it's memory mapped, so any code that runs on the processor can read it. > > which is fairly trivial when the part can boot linux. > > So it sounds like these would qualify as device firmware, which are > okay to have source trees in some circles, but I'm obviously not a lawyer, > and certainly not an FSF representative in any way regarding > licensing/copyright, so I may be totally wrong, and I don't know if > FSF repositories belong in the circles that allow such blobs. it depends how you qualify it. this is not microcode that is loaded at runtime and/or can be modified in any way. it is completely burned into the hardware. every Blackfin processor has a static ROM when it comes out of the factory sitting at address 0xef000000. it's not like we're talking firmware blobs that get loaded into a parallel processor at runtime (i.e. WiFi drivers) which could in practice be tweaked by end users. > Is there any other similar case in the sim/ for other > architectures, perhaps? i couldnt really find anything. but i get the feeling that people stopped doing this level of development on the GNU sim some time ago. > I think you'll need to find out about that redistributable license, and > someone other than me will have to bless having such binaries in > the tree. I suggest contacting FSF legal. > > Patch-wise, I expect you'll at least need to put your answers above > in the sources in some form, and add mentions of the copyright and > licensing that applies to these files and blobs. sounds more like i'll just drop it for now since it is a minor part of the bigger picture. -mike