Libre firmware? [LWN.net]

Libre firmware?

Posted Feb 4, 2026 9:15 UTC (Wed) by Conan_Kudo (subscriber, #103240)
In reply to: Libre firmware? by pabs
Parent article: The future for Tyr

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

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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.