On Sun, Jan 2, 2011 at 7:04 AM, Alexandre Oliva <[email protected]> wrote: > On Jan 1, 2011, Felipe Sanches <[email protected]> wrote: > >> No. this is just the 8051 assembly code (actually the original source >> code developed by the manufacturer, not the result of disassembly of >> the nibary). The FPGA bitstream still does not have the VHDL sources >> available. We can try to convince the manufacturer to release those >> too. > > Just to make sure: this means nothing needs to change in Linux-libre > because of this development, right? I don't know enough about the > firmware files in question to relate what you're saying with them. >
Well... right now nothing changes for LinuxLibre because the device remains non-free (it depends on 2 firmware images: one - the 8051 code - now has source code available but the other - the fpga configuration bitstream - doen't yet). On the next kernel release this driver will be in the staging directory because they are planning to remove it at all in the following release if nobody gets back to work on it (it is considered to be an old, deprecated driver). We may remove just the bitstream in the next linuxlibre release, but the device can't work without the fpga configuration, so it is not really important to keep the free firmware while we do not have access to the fpga source code. There is also an additional issue: the current driver does not work with the real device at all because it does not list the correct usb deviceId of the commercial product. This driver source code is old and supports only the product prototype. I guess that the company got the code into the mainline tree while developing the product but then did not get further versions updated after licensing the technology for commercial use by Terratec. They mantain their current driver source code distribution out-of-tree. This out-of-tree code is from 2010 and is said to work with the device while the mainline tree code is 10 years old. The only practical thing to do is to get their new driver code into mainline and convince them to release the fpga source code. Otherwise we should simply let it die (if nobody moves than it will be removed from Linux within 2 releases). I guess that this is an example of the importance of having statistics of hardware usage/popularity in order to define our hacking priorities. Felipe Sanches _______________________________________________ linux-libre mailing list [email protected] http://www.fsfla.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/linux-libre
