Re: [lemote] Re: Build farm down / building fuloong farms (was: Re: [loongson-buildfarm] build farm down ?)

[Daniel Clark]

On Mon, Feb 15, 2010 at 5:01 PM, Richard Stallman <address@hidden> wrote:
>    In the case of the Fuloong, this would mean that at least PMON's
>    diagnostic output would not be visible via a monitor connected to
>    the VGA port. I am unsure of the ramifications of this with Linux,
>    for example, as the kernel might have code to initialize the
>    device on its own. If not, video might not work correctly in
>    Linux.
>
> Does this apply only to the Fulong and not to the Yeelong?

The blob being needed should apply only to the fuloong.

As I recall there was a problem with the blob existing in the yeeloong
firmware, but we figured out it was not actually being used. The
reason for it being on the yeeloong was that the same firmware build
was used for and loaded on both the yeeloong and fuloong by Lemote,
presumably to simplify things. I think rms asked for a separate
yeeloong build without the blob, and I don't know if that happened
(but if it did I'm pretty sure that information wasn't sent back to
the list).

Brett or someone else better at legal than me: how much if at all a
problem is this? I vaguely recall issues in some cases with
distributing nonfree software even if it isn't used; but that may only
have been if the software was on FSF servers.

On IRC today, Philippe told me that he tried quickly to disable the
VGA console in PMON, but that a lot of the nice barriers that are
supposed to modularize PMON were not respected in code that was added
to support the fuloong and yeeloong (eg the diff between upstream PMON
2000 and the version that works on the Lemote boxes), so actually
removing the VGA console support and related blob may be difficult (at
least for someone who hasn't worked with that code a lot - perhaps it
would be easier for whomever did the Lemote changes in the first
place.)

-- 
Daniel JB Clark | Free Software Activist | http://pobox.com/~dclark