On Thu, Jul 28, 2016 at 10:54:16PM -0400, Solomon Peachy wrote: > On Thu, Jul 28, 2016 at 10:19:07PM -0400, Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote: > > Still not reasonable for Fedora, I think. Red Hat, and RHEL, can > > manage registered licensing to build this binary blob. But binary > > blobs with no tool chain to build htem? > > So it's okay to ship opaque-but-redistributable binary blobs that don't > run on the host CPU (aka device firmware) without any source code (much > less a toolchain that can build it), but shipping something that comes > with fully redistributable (if not outright Free) source code is bad > because there's no Free toolchain to compile it? That doesn't make > sense. > > I'm just trying to understand how FPGA "firmware" is any different than > regular device firmware, and how having source code code available > suddenly turns something from okay to include into something we can't. Agreed. I will just note that this code doesn't run "on" the host CPU, it *is* the host CPU. In many ways its no different from trusting your hardware. Did you inspect the EDA tooling that was used to convert your CPU HDL down to the photomask? Did you even get to see the source HDL for your CPU (clue: unless you work for <large CPU manufacturer>, no you didn't). Anyway if you have $350 burning a hole in your pocket, then I recommend getting this board and playing with it - it's quite fun: https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2016/07/25/risc-v-on-an-fpga-pt-1/ I have an idea to add RISC-V on FPGA as a Fedora "tertiary architecture" (I made up that term), if anyone is interested in that. Rich. -- Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones Read my programming and virtualization blog: http://rwmj.wordpress.com libguestfs lets you edit virtual machines. Supports shell scripting, bindings from many languages. http://libguestfs.org -- devel mailing list devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://lists.fedoraproject.org/admin/lists/devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
