Hi MorseMicro,
Can you give us a status on your OpenSource efforts?
Both GitHub - MorseMicro/firmware_binaries: Morse Micro chip firmware binaries and GitHub - MorseMicro/bcf_binaries are stills ‘placeholders’ with no updates for 5 months now.
I’m also very interested in seeing Linux kernel repos with your patches on top with meaningful commit logs explaining the reasoning of the patches.
Any progress or plan on submitting morse_driver to the Linux-wireless mailing list?
Hi @tharvey,
Appreciate the enthusiasm and the patience! We’ve been actively releasing our microcontroller offering to the open source which is where much of that time has gone. I’m sure that you can appreciate that it is more than just pushing source code to a public repository to move something from a closed source project to the open source. Lots of internal review!
In particular, for the firmware and bcf binaries - we will never be releasing the “source” for these binaries, and instead the repository is largely used for artefact storage which can be found in the release artefacts associated with each repo. See the tarball here: Release Morse Micro 1.12.4 release · MorseMicro/firmware_binaries · GitHub
We typically prefer to not put binary files into git - even if LFS is used - as it’s not strictly what git was built for. However, we may change this in the near future to ease the delivery of bcf files not owned/managed by Morse Micro. I have no hard timeline I can share for this change to the binary repositories yet. Is there anything in particular you want to see from these two repositories?
I’m also very interested in seeing Linux kernel repos with your patches on top with meaningful commit logs explaining the reasoning of the patches.
So am I! There’s a small gap here in how we manage changes to these patches as we release new versions. So we’re experimenting internally with a few workflows. Expect something in the next couple of weeks after we’ve pushed up some driver and OpenWrt updates.
Any progress or plan on submitting morse_driver to the Linux-wireless mailing list?
We are actively working on addressing s1g support gaps in a number of software packages - with a primary focus on OpenWrt as they are receptive to patches “not-yet-merged” into respective upstreams. We have some internal tidying to do before we can submit a driver to the kernel upstream. This work has started, but I can’t give a concrete timeline for submission to the kernel yet.
I would not assume you would ever release any source that generates the BCF files or the mm6108.bin firmware binary. The mm6108.bin is 428KiB in size and the BCF files are about 1KiB in size - both would be considered ‘firmware blobs’ by Linux which are typically provided for other wireless devices publicly downloadable from https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/firmware/linux-firmware.git/ (yes, a git repository for binary files… perfectly acceptable)
I realize you want your module vendors to provide the BCF files which would be fine if they made them easy to find and retrieve but they typically want NDA’s and do not always give you permission to redistribute them in binary form which gets in the way of the end users able to use your chips.
What I’m ultimately hoping for is a public downloadable site for these files (such as your repository or Linux firmware) with a license that allows the files to be redistributed freely in binary form so that firmware can be packaged into distros for easy use by end users. I’m sure you would agree for sure there is nothing ‘proprietary’ in these binary files?
Thanks for the update on the progress of the linux kernel patches and mainlining of your driver!
Imagine the user experience resulting in positive reviews and chip sales if end users could just pop a card with an mm610x on it in their system and do something like ‘apt update && apt install kmod-mm601x firmware-mm610x’ without caring what OS or kernel they have?