[Gta04-owner] Status GTA04 EA

[Butrus Damaskus]

On Mon, Sep 19, 2011 at 9:13 AM, Dr. H. Nikolaus Schaller
<hns at goldelico.com> wrote:
> 4. FSF is interested in removing the non-free libertas firmware from the
> rootfs. So they suggested to put it into a small MCU. If you are interested,
> please read the project proposal and apply:
>
>        http://projects.goldelico.com/p/gta04-main/page/FirmwareInjector/

Hm, how big is the firmware? Cannot this be solved in another way then
by adding components -
(e.g. reserving a special RO partition in the flash reserved for the
firmware and distributing the boards already with it)?

Or, if really a MCU needs to be added make it an option (e.g. the CPU
could wait at boot and try to detect whether the MCU is downloading
the FW, if not, it would - in the case it is installed - upload it
itself...)?

(Yes, I am not excited with increasing the costs for virtually no effect...)

> An alternative could be to write an open firmware stack for the
> Marvell WiFi chip. This was already discussed by OLPC some years
> ago and they have collected some material, but it wasn't finished.

How realistic is this?

> 5. Finally, the system manual is almost complete so that we can put it on
> the servers soon.

Cool :-)

A good job!