NPE Location in NSLU2 Flash

NB: This message is addressed principally to Marc Singer  
(elf-8fiUuRrzOP0dnm+yROfE0A@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, APEX developer) and Martin Michlmayr  
(tbm-R+vWnYXSFMfQT0dZR+AlfA@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, NSLU2-Linux Debian Relations Lead). However,  
comments from all are welcome.

---

Hi there,

As of today I am working on integrating Christian Hohnstaedt's  
IXP_NPE driver into the nslu2-linux.org build system. I'm not  
officially part of the team yet, but I have a first (untested)  
version of the driver on 2.6.18-rc6 in an SVN working copy.

I'm very interested in any plans as to whether there are plans to  
store the microcode for NPE B in a constant location in the flash RAM  
so that Apex, SlugOS and Debian could all access it without having to  
separately distribute this firmware, given its non-free licence. In  
order to initially install the NPE Microcode in its location, I would  
propose a modified version of upslug2.

In order to retrieve the firmware when running linux, I would suggest  
using the mc_grab utility provided by Christian, with the resulting  
file saved to /usr/lib/hotplug/firmware/ and loaded using hotplug  
from this location on every subsequent boot.

The 2.1 version of the NPE B Microcode is approximately 15KB. The NPE  
A Microcode is irrelevant to this discussion (used for ATM) and the  
NPE C Microcode is not currently available from Intel's website,  
though it may be useful in the future for hardware crypto acceleration.

So basically, I'd like to either start or continue any conversation  
that you've been having on this subject :)

Thanks for your time,

Yours,

Michael-Luke

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