Perfection is the enemy of good

Posted Oct 15, 2025 13:23 UTC (Wed) by pabs (subscriber, #43278)
In reply to: Perfection is the enemy of good by farnz
Parent article: The FSF's Librephone project

Some years ago I made a proposal to amend the RYF criteria to require some free freedoms from firmware. They weren't accepted yet, but IIRC the FSF hasn't yet hired someone to look after the RYF program, maybe it would happen after that.

https://libreplanet.org/wiki/Group:Free_Software_Foundati...

I proposed that the FSF:

Change the criteria to require non-free firmware on secondary processors be able to be upgraded, downgraded, locally modified, replaced or reverse engineered. One way to see this is that some freedoms are better than zero freedoms.

Change the criteria to require that free software running on the main processors must be protected from modifications by non-free firmware on secondary processors, through the use of an IOMMU or similar technology.

Perfection is the enemy of good

Posted Oct 15, 2025 22:20 UTC (Wed) by hailfinger (subscriber, #76962) [Link]

> Change the criteria to require that free software running on the main processors must be protected from modifications by non-free firmware on secondary processors, through the use of an IOMMU or similar technology.
That is surprisingly hard on quite a few processors (yes, in the x86 space as well as the ARM space and elsewhere) unless you move the free software into a secure enclave (which usually has its own share of non-free blobs needed to run the free software).

While your additional requirement is useful from a freedom perspective, it is desperately needed from a security perspective.