How to ship an FPGA's code [LWN.net]

How to ship an FPGA's code

Posted Sep 7, 2004 8:19 UTC (Tue) by mwilck (guest, #1966)
In reply to: How to ship an FPGA's code by gerardmcglew
Parent article: Pointless ideology?

There are drivers like that in the kernel that upload huge chunks of binary firmware at startup. For example, the Qlogic fiber channel driver (qla2x00).

There seems to be a consensus (well, more-or-less) that this firmware, from the kernel point of view, is simply a piece of opaque data.

However these drivers apparently don't qualify as "free" in the sense of the Debian social contract (see above).

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How to ship an FPGA's code

Posted Sep 9, 2004 13:24 UTC (Thu) by forthy (guest, #1525) [Link]

For these blobs, there should at least be an interface to user-land. This
data does not belong to the kernel, and it is not under GPL. It's however
ok to have an interface for the kernel to reach outside, and load these
blobs from files.

This also makes it much easier for vendors and users to update these
files: simply copy it to the right location.