Re: [PATCH v3] sim: bfin: new port

Pedro Alves
2011-02-15T15:57:10Z

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.
Is there any other similar case in the sim/ for other
architectures, perhaps?

> > What's the copyright and license for this?
>
> ADI releases the source code to these roms for anyone to view/play with, but
> they hold the copyrights. i'm not sure there is any license mention in the
> source files, but they arent terribly useful for anything else considering
> they're written in pure assembly, assume rom locations in the processor,
> generally require proprietary ADI tools to compile/link, and no one else can
> make a Blackfin processor.
>
> but that is the source code, not the final binary which is what we're talking
> about here: gcc foo.c -o foo; objcopy -O binary foo foo.bin; <convert foo.bin
> into a header>. what license would be necessary for inclusion ? i'm fairly
> certain a redistributable license (if not already in place) would be trivial
> to get seeing as i am an ADI employee. i dont think copyright makes much
> sense with these things.

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.

--
Pedro Alves