Repositories and licences

MeshBench depends on four forks and one unmodified upstream. Each fork carries a single patch, listed here so it can be rebased and so anyone can see how small it is.

Where things live#

The forks, and what each changes#

MeshBench/qemu - branch meshbench-sx1262#

Forked from Espressif's QEMU fork. Adds an SX1262 SPI device, a working GPIO implementation, and machine properties for the radio wiring.

Upstream's GPIO write handler is empty, and RadioLib drives chip select as an ordinary GPIO rather than through the SPI controller. Without the implementation the chip sees an unframed byte stream and the driver reports that no chip is present.

Must be built with --enable-gcrypt, or the esp32 machine will not instantiate.

MeshBench/tlib - branch sevonpend-any-pending#

Forked from antmicro/tlib. One clause: SEVONPEND generates an event for *any* exception entering the pending state, not only for exceptions the CPU would accept.

ARM DDI0403E B1.5.17 does not qualify the event by whether the exception is enabled, and the comment above the line already said "any exception" - but the code asked a function that answers the narrower question. Firmware that sets SEVONPEND, sleeps on WFE and then reads the pending register - handling the source in thread mode with the interrupt deliberately disabled - never woke. MeshCore's published nRF52 builds do exactly that.

MeshBench/renode-infrastructure - branch sevonpend-any-pending#

The C# half of the same fix, exported for the tlib callback. Its own tlib submodule points at the fork above.

MeshBench/renode - branch meshbench#

Points its infrastructure submodule at the fork, and builds the portable package - the one that bundles the .NET runtime, so a machine needs no dotnet installed. Setting MeshBench up should be a download, not a toolchain.

Its build also asserts that both halves of the fix are present in the tree it built. A submodule quietly resolving to upstream would produce a Renode that looks correct and hangs in exactly the place the fix addresses.

Not ours#

meshcore-dev/MeshCore is upstream and unmodified. Nothing in MeshCore is patched. The build points at a checkout and compiles it as it stands, which is the basis of the claim that MeshBench runs real firmware. Board images and bootloader packages are downloaded from MeshCore's own releases at run time.

The Nordic SoftDevice is not redistributable. Anyone running published nRF52 firmware supplies their own copy.

Licence#

MeshBench is GPL-3.0-or-later.

MeshCore's licence is linked into the binary and constrains the choice. Every published version stays free: anyone who receives a binary can obtain the source for it under the same terms, and every release carries a source archive.

The full text and the reasoning are in docs/licence.md in the MeshBench repository. The complete third-party inventory - every fork, every bundled component, everything downloaded at run time, and the map and terrain data attributions - is in the application itself, under Help → Licences & attributions.

That inventory is generated rather than maintained by hand. A linked module whose licence cannot be named fails the build, so the list cannot silently fall behind the dependencies.

Emulating the SoftDevice#

Nordic confirmed in DevZone case 362437 that emulating the SoftDevice for firmware testing is not a licensing problem. The SoftDevice binary is still not redistributable, which is why it is supplied by the person running the emulation rather than shipped.