blob or not to blob

Posted Oct 15, 2025 6:23 UTC (Wed) by decorum (subscriber, #178110)
Parent article: The FSF's Librephone project

One can only hope that they don't fail to meet this high standard. With current hardware, you won't get by without blobs. Or you get a RISC-V based smartphone where the drivers are open source.

blob or not to blob

Posted Oct 15, 2025 8:09 UTC (Wed) by joib (subscriber, #8541) [Link]

RISC-V being an 'open' ISA does not in any way guarantee that devices using RISC-V CPU's won't be locked down and/or require FW blobs and/or proprietary drivers.

The x86 ecosystem being relatively open seems to be a historical anomaly. Manufacturers seem determined to not make that mistake again.

blob or not to blob

Posted Oct 15, 2025 12:21 UTC (Wed) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

> One can only hope that they don't fail to meet this high standard. With current hardware, you won't get by without blobs. Or you get a RISC-V based smartphone where the drivers are open source.

The manufacturer using RISC-V means trading a blob containing an Arm Cortex-R binary for a blob containing a RISC-V binary [1]. Just because the CPU instruction set is nominally "open" doesn't mean any of the rest of the silicon will be.

[1] Likely put together using some sort of proprietary instruction set extension and a proprietary toolchain. Because "freedom for me, but not for thee"