is it GPL?

[kim.jin]

Hi, 
Is it all open firmware GPL? such as OpenBIOS, Smart Firmware, Open Firmware, and OpenBoot? Can any one I can use it free? My project need one boot tool.

Best Regards!

Kim King

2010-09-20

[Mark Cave-Ayland]

kim.jin wrote:
> Hi,
> Is it all open firmware GPL? such as OpenBIOS, Smart Firmware, Open 
> Firmware, and OpenBoot? Can any one I can use it free? My project need 
> one boot tool.
>
> Best Regards!
>
> Kim King

Hi Kim,

OpenBIOS is GPLv2: 
http://tracker.coreboot.org/trac/openbios/browser/trunk/openbios-devel/COPYI....

SmartFirmware claims to be under a BSL-type license:
http://tracker.coreboot.org/trac/smartfirmware/browser/COPYRIGHT

OpenBOOT claims to be under a BSL-type license:
http://tracker.coreboot.org/trac/openboot/browser/trunk/release.mk

Out of all the firmwares, OpenBIOS is the only one in which development 
is currently active so I'd focus your efforts there. Which platform are 
you intending to run on?

ATB,

Mark.

[kim.jin]

Hi Mark,

Thanks a lot for your replying!

We (I myself to development it in fact) will run it for SPARC, SuperSPARC and UltraSPARC. To be honest, I don't hope to learn Forth, as I am C/C++ developer.

Do you have any suggestions?

Kim,

[Artyom Tarasenko]

> We (I myself to development it in fact) will run it for SPARC, SuperSPARC
> and UltraSPARC. To be honest, I don't hope to learn Forth, as I am C/C++
> developer.
>
> Do you have any suggestions?

Not that I had any suggestions, but I think if you plan to use any of
a standard desktop/server OS for SPARC on your hardware it would be
easier with Forth because the existing bootloaders expect it.

Or are you going to use it with some non-general purpose embedded OS?

[Mark Cave-Ayland]

kim.jin wrote:
> Hi Mark,
>
> Thanks a lot for your replying!
>
> We (I myself to development it in fact) will run it for SPARC, 
> SuperSPARC and UltraSPARC. To be honest, I don't hope to learn Forth, as 
> I am C/C++ developer.
>
> Do you have any suggestions?
>
> Kim,

It depends exactly on what you are doing; in OpenBIOS the lower-level 
stuff is handled in C/ASM while the higher level stuff is handled in Forth.

Note that the main entry.S for OpenBIOS is currently tailored to pick up 
information from QEMU so you'd need to tweak this in order to get it to 
run on real hardware. I think Blue was hoping to look at this at some 
point, but never got around to it :)

ATB,

Mark.