Binary-only firmware

Binary-only firmware

Posted Sep 2, 2004 7:29 UTC (Thu) by vmlinuz (subscriber, #24)
In reply to: Free software survives the original copyright holder by gdt
Parent article: Pointless ideology?

It will be interesting to see if the reasoning behind removing the PWC compression API is applied to various firmware download APIs in drivers. Most of those APIs only exist to facilitate the use of non-free firmware.

As I understand it - and I could be wrong - there has been a line drawn between firmware like this, where the kernel driver is responsible for loading the code into an external device, and a binary driver, where the closed-source code is loaded into the kernel and executed within the kernel's address space on the system CPU. In a perfect world, of course we'd like binary-only firmware to go away too, but in the same way that most people are willing to accept, say, a closed-source BIOS, where they may not accept a closed-source kernel, binary-only firmware is a much lesser evil.

Plus, of course, for those devices which *don't* have the firmware loaded by the driver, they would tend to have it in a ROM on the device anyway, so unless you're going to demand that every piece of code, microcode, firmware, etc. exectuting within your system is open, it doesn't make all that much difference if the firmware is loaded by the kernel driver, or just there permanently...

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