[Arm-netbook] Mele box group on counting

[Henrik Nordström]

fre 2012-03-09 klockan 13:22 +0000 skrev lkcl luke:

>  yeahh, i will not.   you've seen that fedora are excluding the
> non-free proprietary blob which is required to boot up the CPU?  the
> GPU is in control of the CPU.

That chip is a very odd design wher the GPU runs the bootloader which
loads what needs to be loaded into RAM and then starts execution of the
main ARM CPU.

On the positive side it means the GPU gets running very early, allowing
for fancy display during booting.

On the negative side updating the GPU firmware requires rewriting the
bootloader, with all it's risks of bricking things.

And on the very negative side it means requiring a proprietary firmware
blob to at all be able to boot even if all one want's is ARM + UART +
gpio.

Last time I discussed this withing Fedora we do not oppose the GPU
bootloader. It's a firmware for the GPU, not the CPU. But it cannot
easily be shipped with Fedora unless certain license requirements are
fulfilled (free redistribution etc..). I have not looked into the
Rasberry Pi GPU firmware license or followed the work of preparing
Fedora for Raberry Pi lately as the Pi is not a device that interests
me.

>  all gnu/linux distros which respect Software Freedom are going to
> have to do the same thing.

To some extent yes.

Regards
Henirk