[meta-freescale] brcmfmac43430-sdio.bin and BCM43430A1.hcd and upstream linux-firmware

[Ryan Harkin]

Hello,

I'm sure there's a lot of history around this topic, so I'm sorry if this
is opening up old wounds. I'm sure it's not straight forward.

First, a bit of background:

I'm using an NXP WaRP7 board. It has a Murata LBEE5KL1DX WiFi/Bluetooth
chip, which is in turn has a Cypress CYW4343W chipset.

I use meta-freescale*, but I use a 4.14 kernel, so I have various bbappend
over-rides for that in my own layer that I'm developing.

One big difference between 4.1 and 4.14 is the CYW4343W firmware. The 4.1
kernel from meta-freescale uses an older firmware for these components and
they don't work for my 4.14 setup.

As I'm also building for RaspberryPi3 and have meta-raspberrypi in my
environment, it's been convenient for me to use a bbappend in my own layer
to get the firmware from meta-raspberrypi into my WaRP7 build.

But this no longer works well since a recent commit to lock down the recipe
[3]. I've created bbappends for both wifi and BT firmware as a workaround.
But this isn't really a nice approach, I think.

It seems better to have both the WiFi and BT firmware upstream in
linux-firmware and take it from the regular linux-firmware.bb.

Currently, there is an old version of the WiFi firmware upstream [4] but
nothing for BT, to my knowledge.

There is a newer version of the wifi f/w available publicly [1] and on
meta-freescale [2], but this hasn't been sent upstream. I'm sure this is a
complex situation and it's not clear to me where this firmware came from
and what licensing restrictions it comes with other than Phil Elwell's
comment [1] from almost 5 months ago:

"Cypress are happy for that firmware and nvram.txt to be redistributed,
They are in the process of investigating a few issues for us, but I would
expect that firmware or a further update to it to eventually appear in the
linux-firmware repo."

Who, if anyone, is responsible for this or who can I contact to try to get
both of these upstream in linux-firmware?

I don't think it's appropriate for me to try to send it there, saying as I
don't know the origin or licensing terms that come with either blob. But if
nobody else wants to do it...

Or is there another way I should be getting this firmware, like getting it
copy from Cypress and hosting it in my own layer? (Hosting it myself seems
very wrong, saying as it's a component used on many boards and I see many
others struggling with this same issue).

Finally, the brcmfmac43430-sdio.txt configuration file appears to be a
separate delivery from the .bin file and isn't in linux-firmware. I presume
there's some sensible reason for that, like board specific values, etc...
But for my purposes, I need a place to pull it from where its provenance is
known, or a version I can legally host and redistribute.

Again the licensing terms of the files in meta-raspberrypi aren't clear to
me and I don't want to tread on any toes. So where am I supposed to get
that file from in a way that I can be sure I'm permitted to redistribute it?

Regards,
Ryan.

[1] XECDesign tell Andrei Gherzan they were given permission to
redistribute 7.45.41.46 firmware with raspbian
https://github.com/RPi-Distro/repo/issues/88

[2] Andrei Gherzan updates meta-raspberrypi to use WiFi firmware 7.45.41.46
https://github.com/agherzan/meta-raspberrypi/commit/acd58692356df2bbdc3aa1d6b15f44c104ad3b45

[3] Martin Kelly's commit to change linux-firmware_%bbappend to be rpi
specific:
https://github.com/agherzan/meta-raspberrypi/commit/61c2a965a21cfc927b817dc517100d31c07ffa95

[4] Arend van Spriel adds 7.45.41.26 to linux-firmware
https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/firmware/linux-firmware.git/commit/brcm/brcmfmac43430-sdio.bin?id=c4c07a8d1128d50a5c2885ceea1abbebaa82f820

[5] Tom Doehring adds the BT firware
https://github.com/agherzan/meta-raspberrypi/commit/1317a894faa671c82193c1f18074d84db2cb9e35

[6] Andrei Gherzan updates the BT firmware from Raspbian
https://github.com/agherzan/meta-raspberrypi/commit/f864b1068fada7c70d409e4aad7075dd6f78569e
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