- sorting out non-free firmware [LWN.net]

- sorting out non-free firmware

Posted Jun 21, 2005 2:09 UTC (Tue) by simon_kitching (guest, #4874)
In reply to: - sorting out non-free firmware by lordsutch
Parent article: Debian release team meeting minutes

Yep, that's my understanding too. At the moment, there are some devices for which open-source drivers are available, but where the device itself needs to be sent a closed-source firmware driver before it can be used. This isn't a major concern for even the most rabid open-source fan; external devices that have a properly documented interface are fine even when their internal software isn't available. But the current implementation is for the firmware blob to be built in to the driver - and if the driver is compiled into the kernel then the closed-source blob is part of the kernel image which quite a few people object to.

The proposed solution, as I understand it, is to provide a facility where drivers can send a request to user-space to fetch the binary blob. The driver itself can then be compiled into the kernel without problems, while the closed-source blob can be apt-get installed from a non-free repository. There are issues, though, like when such a driver wants to initialise itself before the filesystem is available...

NB: I'm not an expert on these issues; corrections are welcome.

(Log in to post comments)

Firmware loading

Posted Jun 21, 2005 9:51 UTC (Tue) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link]

There already is load-firmware-from-userspace support in the kernel, and quite a few drivers use it.

The problem is converting the remaining drivers and submitting that to the kernel maintainers. This is a problem because you don't want to do that if you don't have the hardware to test your changes with. :-/

- sorting out non-free firmware

Posted Jun 22, 2005 3:11 UTC (Wed) by Ross (subscriber, #4065) [Link]

The other point which needs to be made is that the copyright (and patents,
if any) holder of such a binary blob should give clear permission for it
to distributed freely, loaded into hardware, and executed by the hardware.