I did not use git-lfs (before), so I ASSumed it was optional and I ended up with a bunch of files that were only couple of hundred bytes and contained text like the following:
$ cat soft_3rdpart/IMG_GPU/out/img-gpu-powervr-bin-1.17.6210866.tar.gz
version https://git-lfs.github.com/spec/v1
oid sha256:8ef5eba77c776e0d4444d819e12c64bfa8eee0ae2cdf90b6eb7a3a9df7bd7ef2
size 62412446
If you installed git-lfs and then run “git lfs fetch” or “git-lfs fetch” it will pull down the “large file storage” files from at a guess an external webserver (I have not looked into the exact details of how it works yet)!
The files in VisionFive2 repository that are currently stored as lfs files using git lfs module are:
soft_3rdpart/IMG_GPU/out/img-gpu-powervr-bin-1.17.6210866.tar.gz
soft_3rdpart/IMG_GPU/out/img-gpu-powervr-bin-1.15.6052913.tar.gz
soft_3rdpart/ispsdk/DDKSource/libispsdk/libStfIncludes.a
soft_3rdpart/ispsdk/DDKSource/libispsdk/libStfCommon.a
soft_3rdpart/ispsdk/DDKSource/libispsdk/libStfLib_LinkedList.a
soft_3rdpart/ispsdk/DDKSource/libispsdk/libISPC.a
soft_3rdpart/ispsdk/DDKSource/libispsdk/libISP_API.a
soft_3rdpart/ispsdk/DDKSource/libispsdk/libmedia-ctrl.a
soft_3rdpart/ispsdk/DDKSource/libispsdk/libCI_User.a
$ cat .gitattributes
soft_3rdpart/IMG_GPU/out/.tar.gz filter=lfs diff=lfs merge=lfs -text
soft_3rdpart/ispsdk/DDKSource/libispsdk/.a filter=lfs diff=lfs merge=lfs -text
My guess is that the git-lfs module is used because it reduces bandwidth hosting costs because people will end up with a single revision of large binary files (The very last revision, with no local copy of any previous revisions by default. “git lfs fetch --all” would pull down all current and previous revisions, really useful if you were migrating from one git provider to another.).