Re: [Etherboot-developers] Question on supporting nVidia .o driver

[Andy G. <an...@wa...>]

Peter Lister wrote:

> Misunderstanding on Mr Green's part. My suggestion was that the
> nvnetlib.o contains enough NIC API on to which we could glue an EB
> driver API (as suggested already). It seems to me that the *driver* is
> essentially open source, but that the minutiae of tweaking the NIC is
> enclosed in nvnetlib.o - I've never done an Etherboot polling driver
> before, but I've looked at enough NIC specs to guess that this is true,
> and my original post to suggest to the xbox-linux guys that, if
> possible, a

It seems I did misunderstand you here, however, I was imagining that 
nvnetlib.o is full of APIs that take kernel-defined structs as 
parameters, etc, and at least to this extent it will need to be kept 
satisfied.

> And if we *do* hit any problems, we could just ask nVidia, no? At least
> lets give them opportunity to be helpful before assuming that they
> aren't. The LinuxBIOS experience is somethimes that asking hw vendors
> for specs means that the *spec* may be NDA'd even though the resulting
> source can be open.

Yes, this work should be equally applicable to the nForce motherboards, 
in case the xbox is a bit contentious for them.

> The GPL is only "enforced" at the point of *distribution* (from reading
> http://emoglen.law.columbia.edu/publications/lu-12.html), but we are not
> claiming nvnetlib.o is GPL'd. It's nVidia's copyright, which they
> license as being OK for distribution in Linux related circumstances. The
> question is more does *Etherboot* tolerate being linked with such code?
> 
> Actually, since EB can boot FreeDOS and maybe other things, I suppose
> it's not exclusively Linux related. :)

The .o can be kept at arms length from whatever shim is needed to 
interface it to the etherboot stuff, I can imagine it can be distributed 
in a way that nobody will be unhappy.

-Andy