Libre firmware? [LWN.net]

Libre firmware?

Posted Feb 4, 2026 1:03 UTC (Wed) by pabs (subscriber, #43278)
Parent article: The future for Tyr

Do Mali GPUs check signatures on the firmware? Or is there a chance of libre firmware eventually?

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Libre firmware?

Posted Feb 4, 2026 9:15 UTC (Wed) by Conan_Kudo (subscriber, #103240) [Link] (6 responses)

I think the idea of libre firmware is something we can no longer expect for anything anymore.

Libre firmware?

Posted Feb 4, 2026 10:12 UTC (Wed) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link] (5 responses)

Intel managed to do it for their audio firmware, so why not GPU firmware too?

https://sofproject.org/

Of course, for most of the supported hardware, the firmware is open source but not libre because of signatures. There is some supported hardware where you can sign using a published "community" private key though. Eventually they may make a Secure Boot style setup with user-enrollable keys though.

https://github.com/thesofproject/sof/issues/5814

Libre firmware?

Posted Feb 4, 2026 18:43 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (4 responses)

> Intel managed to do it for their audio firmware, so why not GPU firmware too?

Complexity, mainly. Apparently, the firmware for something like the recent NVidia/AMD GPUs has millions and millions of lines of code. Tightly coupled to specific hardware.

Libre firmware?

Posted Feb 4, 2026 18:52 UTC (Wed) by Conan_Kudo (subscriber, #103240) [Link] (1 responses)

They are rumored to be full computer systems in their own right, though probably not Linux systems. Heck, the NVIDIA GSP is a full RISC-V computer. So the firmware is an operating system payload for that computer.

Libre firmware?

Posted Feb 5, 2026 0:43 UTC (Thu) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]

The same goes for probably most firmware I guess

SOF itself can be based on two different embedded OSes; XTOS or Zephyr.

https://thesofproject.github.io/latest/architectures/

This reminds me that hardware vendors have been moving Linux off into a corner for years:

https://www.usenix.org/conference/osdi21/presentation/fri...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36myc8wQhLo

Libre firmware?

Posted Feb 9, 2026 10:55 UTC (Mon) by taladar (subscriber, #68407) [Link] (1 responses)

To me complexity sounds more like an argument for open sourcing it since complexity naturally prevents a competitor from copying your solutions in a reasonable amount of time so there is really no trade secret angle to be used to justify closed source code bases.

Libre firmware?

Posted Feb 9, 2026 11:05 UTC (Mon) by Conan_Kudo (subscriber, #103240) [Link]

Probably the real reason is that they don't own the IP and cannot reasonably get the rights for it to be open even if they wanted to.

Libre firmware?

Posted Feb 13, 2026 2:32 UTC (Fri) by fratti (subscriber, #105722) [Link]

You can load your own firmware without needing to do any signing, people have done so already to play around with the MCU that's AFAIK a Cortex-M7 running at gigahertz.

But you'll have to write it yourself, there's no interest in replacing it by any of the existing contributors right now as far as I'm aware, and the official firmware's interface is what the driver targets.