Re: RTL8159 firmware

[Andrew Lunn]

On Wed, Jul 01, 2026 at 07:24:13PM +0200, Birger Koblitz wrote:
> Hi Jan,
> 
> On 7/1/26 19:13, Jan Hendrik Farr wrote:
> > Hi Birger,
> > 
> > it looks like the firmware file rtl_nic/rtl8159-1.fw isn't in linux-firmware yet.
> > Could you send it for people to potentially test?
> > 
> > Jan
> > 
> The code to create the binary firmware file is at:
> https://gitlab.com/koblitz-rtlnic/rtlnic_fw
> But I cannot submit the firmware itself to linux-firmware, as the sourcecode from
> which the binary data is extracted is published by Realtek under the GPL.

The obvious work around is to not convert it to binary.

8152.c has a clear GPL-2.0 header. So you can edit that file, extract
the two arrays, and it would still be GPL. You can make the firmware
loader in the driver parse the ASCII array as it is. It also looks
like you can .xz or .zst compress it, and the kernel
_request_firmware() will handle the decompression for you.

Just clearly document what you have done, and i think you are O.K. But
IANAL.

	Andrew