non-free mailinglists mandated by the FSF? [LWN.net]

non-free mailinglists mandated by the FSF?

Posted Jul 12, 2012 16:58 UTC (Thu) by nickbp (subscriber, #63605)
In reply to: non-free mailinglists mandated by the FSF? by nickbp
Parent article: Searching for common ground between Debian and FSF

Or, now that I think about it, trying to figure out why my ATI card had such awful performance after switching to the free radeon drivers from the decidedly less-free fglrx, a situation which I ran into on squeeze just a few weeks ago when AMD dropped support for my HD4850.

The answer, if a developer were permitted to provide it, would be to install linux-firmware-nonfree, which includes a binary blob necessary for radeon to support 3d acceleration on my card. I only discovered this solution myself when skimming Xorg.0.log; would the log entry mentioning the lack of a binary blob be removed as well?

Before discovering the correct solution, I was considering simply buying a new nvidia card, which would have brought me completely back into the fold of proprietary video drivers, and left me with the (incorrect) assumption that radeon was unsuitable for regular use.

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non-free mailinglists mandated by the FSF?

Posted Jul 16, 2012 17:45 UTC (Mon) by BenHutchings (subscriber, #37955) [Link]

I'm a member of the Debian kernel team, partly responsible both for removing firmware from the kernel package, packaging it separately, and adding some of the warning messages about drivers loaded but missing firmware. My aim has been to comply with all parts of the Debian Social Contract, keeping non-free software out of 'main' but not standing of the way of users who want to use it. (Personally, I have firmware-iwlwifi installed on my laptop and firmware-linux-nonfree installed on a desktop with a Radeon GPU.)

I'm not sure we've got the conditions for warning messages quite right: some users (such as you) evidently don't see any messages, and some see them several times even though the firmware isn't needed for their specific hardware.

There is also an ongoing issue with radeon where the upstream developers try to make it functional without the non-free firmware but this doesn't seem to work with many of the newer chips (it's not just slow but may fail to generate a display at all).