"Gary" == Gary Thomas <gary at mlbassoc dot com> writes:
<snip>
Gary> This system uses FPGA devices for a number of peripherals
Gary> (the PCI bus in particular). The only way to use those
Gary> devices is to program them - at boot time - with this data.
Gary> The only place to hold this data on the platform is in the
Gary> FLASH. So, the choice would be to have some
Gary> very-hard-to-initialize-and-maintain way to get it into part
Gary> of the FLASH, or make it be part of RedBoot, which is what I
Gary> chose.
Gary> n.b. this sort of thing will become more and more popular in
Gary> the future. FPGA and soft-core systems are beginning to be
Gary> very common.
Understood. Using a couple of 100K of flash for this sort of thing
seems expensive, but maybe with current hardware it has become
economical.
I suspect Stallman would want the VHDL (or whatever) source files
included in the package in addition to the generated bitstreams, but I
consider that unnecessary.