[OLPC-devel] GPL compliance for buildrom

[Jim Gettys]

On Tue, 2006-08-22 at 09:55 -0700, Mitch Bradley wrote:
> Actually, the upgrade procedure that I documented does indeed include 
> Richard's image.  Or more precisely,
> a slightly enhanced version of it that I created.
> 
> My enhancements consisted of:
> 
> a) Moving linuxbios.rom into the initrd image so that it's not necessary 
> to mount the boot media
> as part of the procedure.  This also fixes a problem I was having, in 
> which the olpcflash command
> was unable to open the linuxbios.rom file, even though it was mounted.
> 
> b) Creating simple shell scripts "flashlb" and "restore" to collapse the 
> required command sequences
> into one-word, nothing to get wrong, zingers.  This also allowed me to 
> add a small measure of
> recoverability that is useful for testing - you can go back to 
> InsydeBIOS if you do it before rebooting.

Sounds good.

> 
> c) Publishing the image in uncompressed form to avoid the "bunzip" 
> step.  The bzip form saves only 1 MB out of 5.
> An md5 sum is provided so you can check the image.

Publishing in an uncompressed form allows for data transfer errors.
bzip and friends add a checksum that you'll hit when you uncompress and
have had a transfer error.

I recommend *not* providing an uncompressed version.

> 
> The process that I used to create the enhanced version was:
> 
> 1) Mount Richard's image on a host system
> 2) Use gunzip and cpio to unpack the initrd into a directory tree
> 3) Copy the linuxbios.rom file into that tree
> 4) Add the shell scripts to the tree
> 5) Use cpio and gzip to recreate initrd from the directory tree
> 6)
> 
> Jim Gettys wrote:
> > No....
> >
> > The idea has been to have a single Fedora image you can put on disk or a
> > flash key, boot it, and then reflash the SPI rom.
> >
> > At that point, you can either continue running your existing bits (if
> > you've updated your system to fbdev and a new X driver), or to install
> > the Fedora distribution, where you want.  It is able to either install
> > onto disk, flash key or internal flash.
> >
> > In short, one stop shopping.
> >                        - Jim
> >
> >
> > On Tue, 2006-08-22 at 11:06 -0500, Richard Smith wrote:
> >   
> >>> I'd like to get at least 3 people able to follow a set of directions
> >>> before inflicting it on the world.
> >>>
> >>>       
> >> Does the upgrade procedure include my small upgrade image I created
> >> last friday?
> >> If so then it needs to change now that we are going to work with 1MiB ROM files.
> >>
> >>     
> 
-- 
Jim Gettys
One Laptop Per Child