Stuart MacDonald <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
>Okay, I missed part of this discussion yesterday, so
>my comments may be slightly off.
>It seems that this effort is to move the firmware from
>the kernel into user space?
>That doesn't make a lot of sense to me (although I
>see the savings of code size for the kernel); it seems
>like this makes it the user space apps' jobs to load
>the firmware to use the driver.
The "hot plug" code will take care of this for you
automatically if you configure it (and Linux distributions
will presumably ship with it configured).
The user level loading allows you to load any firmware you want
or not load the firmware at all (I guess you'd load it under windows
or whatever people did before 2.3.50), making the process not
dependent on or linked to the kernel drivers. It makes it possible
for Linux distributions that do not include GPL-incompatible content
or segregate it somehow to avoid having to maintain a lot of kernel
changes. Other minor benefits are that user level EZUSB code uploading
takes uploaded EZUSB images out of the already overloaded central
Linux release loop, and makes it easier to do things like EZUSB
development and debugging.
Anyhow, I am quite convinced that including the firmware in
a GPL'ed kernel module is copyright infringement. In the case of USB
kernel modules, I believe it actually infringes Yggdrasil copyrights.
Please stop.
>Also, moving the firmware away from the kernel
>would seem to prevent using those ports as
>serial consoles because the firmware wouldn't load
>until after init was running sometime, instead of at
>kernel boot.
You cannot use USB serial devices as serial consoles in either
case. USB is not initialized soon enough.
>Am I correct? Or am I missing vital info?
>On that note, is there an archive somewhere that I'm
>not aware of?
What kind of archive? The email covering this topic has
occurred primarily in the last 72 hours. The ezusb_upload and
ezusb_firmware tar files are FTPable from
ftp://ftp.yggdrasil.com/private/adam/ezusb/. A number of other
people have posted similar tools in this discussion, including:
fwload.c by Martin Diehl, which he just posted to this list
http://www.activewireinc.com/download/ezload-0.2.tar.gz by
Brad Hards
A port (and extension) of the "cypress ezusb development kit" at
https://www.cypress.com/design/progprods/usb/devtools/cy3681.html,
by Wolfgang Rapp, although he cautions to check the copyright
status of the Cypress part. You can email him for it
([EMAIL PROTECTED]).
Did I miss any?
If one of these other tools turns out to be fully GPL
compatible and can have the right comand line options to work
with hot plugging (and works), then my preference would be to convert
the ezusb firmware images to use that in an effort to unify ezusb
development a bit.
Adam J. Richter __ ______________ 4880 Stevens Creek Blvd, Suite 104
[EMAIL PROTECTED] \ / San Jose, California 95129-1034
+1 408 261-6630 | g g d r a s i l United States of America
fax +1 408 261-6631 "Free Software For The Rest Of Us."
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