Re: broadcom proposed firmware licence, please comment ...
On Sun, May 29, 2005 at 05:48:55AM -0400, Nathanael Nerode wrote:
> Before you move the whole driver to non-free, you should know that I have made
> a version of the driver which loads the firmware from files if it is
> available (many tg3 users don't *need* the firmware), and I believe that is
> the one currently in Debian's kernel tree. I have also designed a package
> containing appropriate firmware files for this version of the driver. The
> only reason I have not published the package yet is that it was under this
> legal cloud.
>
> The package generates the firmware files as arch-independent binary files
> (with a specified endianness) by writing out the hex in a really
> simple-minded way. (Each lump of hex has a length and a lump in the C file,
> and I just write the the length and the lump out binary, in a defined order.)
>
> If this binary form counts as "equivalent", then I have a package for you :-),
> and I just have to fix it up to generate a udeb (and get a sponsor).
I think it would probably be better for you not to generate a udeb, and
let the linux-modules-nonfree-di-* source packages in d-i build-depend
on your firmware package instead; that means we don't have to cope with
lots of different firmware udebs in the d-i build system, and can
instead just have one or a few packages called
"nic-firmware-2.6.11-386", etc.
That said, I don't know exactly what we're doing about firmware yet. I
have a kernel-wedge patch in Ubuntu which supports generating
*-firmware-*-di udebs, although it's a bit clone-and-hack from
copy-modules and I haven't ported it to kernel-wedge 2 yet.
Cheers,
--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@debian.org]
Reply to: