Linux in a binary world... a doomsday scenario [LWN.net]

From:		Arjan van de Ven <arjan-AT-infradead.org>
To:		linux-kernel-AT-vger.kernel.org
Subject:		Linux in a binary world... a doomsday scenario
Date:		Mon, 05 Dec 2005 11:52:32 +0100

Linux in a binary world


What if.. what if the linux kernel developers tomorrow accept that
binary modules are OK and are essential for the progress of linux. 

a hypothetical doomsday scenario by Arjan van de Ven

the primary assumption in this scenario is obviously not going to
happen, but all assumptions that follow are based things that are true
in some form or another, but of course the names of the "innocent" have
been omitted.




On December 6th, 2005 the kernel developers en mass decide that binary
modules are legally fine and also essential for the progress of linux,
and are as such a desirable thing. At first, the development process of
the linux kernel doesn't change much other than a bunch more symbols
getting exported, and EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL removed.

Within 3 weeks, distributions like Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SuSE's
SLES distribution start to include a wide variety of binary modules on
their installation CDs. Debian renounces this and stays pure to the
cause, as do other open distributions like Fedora Core and openSuSE. 

The enterprise distros don't just NVidias and ATIs modules, but include
all the OEM vendor "fakeraid" modules and the various wireless,
winmodem, windsl and TCP-offloading modules as well,. However, unlike
NVidia and ATI, most of the binary driver vendors do not provide their
drivers in a "glue layer" source form, they provide only the final
binaries.

Several hardware vendors that have been friendly to open source so far,
see their competitors ship only binary drivers, and internally they
start to see pressure to also keep the IP private, and they know that
they haven't used some features of the hardware because their legal
department didn't want that IP in the public. As a result they perceive
their competitors binary drivers to be at a theoretical advantage, or at
least their own drivers could be at an advantage if they were also
closed, because they then can use those few extra features to be ahead
of the competition. By February 1st 2006, about half the hardware
vendors have refocused their internal linux driver efforts to create
value adds in the binary drivers they will release in addition to the
open drivers that already exist. Some vendors even openly stopped
supporting the open drivers because they don't have enough resources
to do both.

March 1st. All the new server lines from the top tier hardware vendors
come out with the next generation storage and network hardware. This
hardware comes with binary drivers for the last 2 versions of RHEL and
SLES distributions, and these drivers are already integrated into the
February refreshes of these distributions. One of the storage vendors
releases their driver in a .o + glue layer format, the others doesn't
bother and only releases binaries for these two distributions. Two of
the network card manufacturers release an update for their open source
driver to minimally support the new cards, the others don't. Consumer
hardware is largely unaffected; most consumer chipsets standardize on
AHCI for SATA storage and keep the existing feature sets in networking
chipsets.

April 1st. 2 of the consumer chipset makers have upgraded their chipsets
to include a new and exciting audio feature that enables enhanced DVD
playback, but unfortunately this caused them to deviate from the
'standard' i810 audio hardware interface. One of them releases a binary
driver for a handful of distributions, the other doesn't consider linux
relevant for the desktop and hasn't bothered to do a linux driver yet.

May 1st All of the server class hardware you can buy requires at least
one but usually 2 or 3 binary modules to operate. While some of these
modules are available in blob+glue form, several are only available for
RHEL3, RHEL4 and SLES9 and sometimes the newly released SLES10. Linux
users will have the choice of 4 kernels for these servers at this time,
but no hope to run a kernel.org kernel on these servers. The Ubuntu
people are very upset and are trying hard, with varying success, to get
drivers available for their distribution. Due to this lobby success,
about 50% of the servers can be used with the Ubuntu kernel as well.

June 1st. A huge flamewar, the fourth on this topic since January,
happens on the linux-kernel mailing list. Users and some developers are
demanding that the kernel.org kernel adopts either the existing RHEL or
the SLES module ABI. Investigation shows that this is not possible, and
the thread turns into a discussion on designing a new ABI versus
freezing the existing one. Many kernel developers feel that the existing
ad-hoc ABI is not suitable for freezing and that a new ABI and API,
designed such that it can be kept stable more easily is the way to go,
while others say that this takes too much time and then won't help for
the next 2 years until RHEL and SLES have adopted this ABI, and at least
demand an immediate freeze of the kernel.org ABI so that the upcoming
RHEL5 release maybe uses it, and thus gets drivers written for it. Users
generally use RHEL or SLES for production servers, and clones like
CENTOS which have released binary compatible kernels.

July 1st. It's increasingly hard to run linux without binary modules on
most new consumer PCs. While a year earlier people would have to give up
3D acceleration for this often, now even 2D doesn't work without binary
drivers, nor does networking (both fixed wire or wireless) or sound. For
half the machines there is not enough linux support available at all,
while 20% use ndiswrapper like translation layers to run the Windows
sound and networking drivers. The Debian project, unable to run on most
machines now, is losing massive amounts of users to Ubuntu and
Ubuntu-Debian hybrids. Debian-legal and various other project lists are
impossible to read by people not interested in this particular
flame-topic. Most of the vendors who kept their open source drivers at
least somewhat updated have basically stopped doing so.

July 14th. Linus declares the kernel ABI stable but also splits off a
2.7 kernel and declares that the 2.8 kernel will have a different ABI.
In practice, only people who held on to their old machines can assist in
the 2.7 development, since none of the vendor drivers, not even the ones
who still have a blob+glue construct care about the 'too rapid' moving
development tree. 

August 21st. A serious security flaw is found in the 2.6 series, which
turns out to be a design flaw in a key sysfs API. Fixing this flaw would
require to break the module ABI and practically all modules out there,
while not fixing this flaw leaves a potential roothole open. A quick fix
is made available under a CONFIG_ option, but users who need binary
drivers have no choice but leave their systems vulnerable. Flamewars on
lkml flare up again that say Linus made a mistake in freezing the
existing ABI rather than creating a new one designed to be frozen. 2.7
development has mostly stagnated and a patch is proposed to have 2.7
have the 2.6 ABI again, reverting several key VM subsystem improvements
and Ingo's realtime patches.

August 26th. A precooked exploit for the security hole hits bugtraq, and
has been sighted in the wild as used by various rootkits. A php exploit
uses it to go from the httpd user to root. Users are putting pressure on
module vendors to release modules for the new ABI, and several actually
do so in the next three weeks. Others, mostly in the consumer area, say
that the hardware in question is no longer sold and that they aren't
going to spend any time or effort on drivers for it.






Now this scenario may sound unlikely to you. And thankfully the main
assumption (the December 6th event) is extremely unlikely.  

However, and this unfortunately, several of the other "leaps" aren't
that unlikely. In fact, some of these results are likely to happen
regardless; witness the flamewars on lkml about breaking module API/ABI.
Witness the ndiswrapper effect of vendors now saying "we support linux
because ndiswrapper can use our windows driver". I hope they won't
happen. Some of that hope will be idle hope, but I believe that the
advantages of freedom in the end are strong enough to overcome the
counter forces.

to post comments

Linux in a binary world... a doomsday scenario

Posted Dec 5, 2005 20:49 UTC (Mon) by Baylink (guest, #755) [Link] (32 responses)

Ah, yes... the Cautionary Tale.

Love those. :-)

This one appears to have been written by someone for whom English is a second (or third; we Americans are language wimps :-) language, and therefore isn't a lyrical as, say, Robin Cook.

That's not a good reason to ignore it.

And it doesn't even *mention* Palladium and other forms of Treacherous Computing (like SATA interfaces with hardware encryption on the link, as have been bandied about in the past.

As things proceed, we're *all* going to have to get as paranoid and hardcore as rms is, folks, or the big sociopathic public corporations will take it all away from us: it's *what they do*.

They can't maximize profit and still leave us able to exercise our constitutional rights. And *they* aren't forbidden to try by that constitution; only the government is.

If you're not scared, you're not paying enough attention.

But who knows; maybe it's just me...

So many things are just me.

Linux in a binary world... a doomsday scenario

Posted Dec 5, 2005 21:41 UTC (Mon) by bk (guest, #25617) [Link] (31 responses)

They can't maximize profit and still leave us able to exercise our constitutional rights.

While I agree strongly with your post, there is no constitutional guarantee that you have a free, open PC. In fact, the US constitution guarantees very little, and the few rights it does grant have no enforcement mechanism (other than citizens taking up arms en masse and revolting).

This kind of constitutional hyperbole doesn't help anything, and makes us appear somewhat crackpot-ish.

Linux in a binary world... a doomsday scenario

Posted Dec 5, 2005 22:15 UTC (Mon) by jwb (guest, #15467) [Link] (18 responses)

I think your understanding of the US Constitution is a bit backwards. The Constitution reserves all rights to the states, and to the people. It explicitly guarantees certain rights, but also explicity points out that those rights are not to be construed as excluding others. The Constitution only abridges a very few rights.

But I agree with you, we do not enjoy a natural or legal right to be provided with a certain kind of computer and software.

Linux in a binary world... a doomsday scenario

Posted Dec 5, 2005 22:57 UTC (Mon) by dmaxwell (guest, #14010) [Link] (1 responses)

But I agree with you, we do not enjoy a natural or legal right to be provided with a certain kind of computer and software

True. However, I would like to use my computer and software as one way of exercising my rights. Things like Treacherous Computing are designed or can be designed to ensure that I do no such thing. As computing becomes more and more ubiquitous, this intersection of your rights and what your systems permit will conflict more and more. For instance, the EULA on some MS products say that you may not use the products to criticize MS. With Treacherous Computing, MS may have the means to send Non-Criticism Enforcement goons straight to your house. It seems far fetched now but once people accept the notion that it is OK for vendors to dictate what your systems can and cannot do then it won't.

We may not have a natural right to certain kinds of computers and software. But I am thinking more and more than computers and software designed to abridge the natural rights I do have are not to be tolerated. Oh dear, I'm starting to sound like RMS...

Linux in a binary world... a doomsday scenario

Posted Dec 7, 2005 4:30 UTC (Wed) by zblaxell (subscriber, #26385) [Link]

"With Treacherous Computing, MS may have the means to send Non-Criticism Enforcement goons straight to your house"

As I read it, TC gives MS the means to retroactively find and obfuscate the decryption keys of all your criticism (or anything other files coming from your computer) from everyone's computer, possibly combined with aggressive mandatory deletion of local copies.

Sending goons to your house is so 20th-century. It's too late then anyway--the criticism in your house isn't what MS customers are reading--they're reading copies of your criticism on web sites and USENET. In the 21st century, MS will be able to send robogoons to everyone who might read your criticism.

Restore the Old Republic

Posted Dec 5, 2005 23:39 UTC (Mon) by jmorris42 (guest, #2203) [Link] (15 responses)

> The Constitution reserves all rights to the states, and to the people.

Not true, and hasn't been for over a hundred years. The 9th and 10th Amendments are effectively removed from the Constituition by long standing usage. Don't believe me? Then find the justification for the Dept of Education in the US Constituition. Were the 9th and 10th still in effect they would clearly forbid one. I submit the fact it indeed exists as irrefutable proof the 9th and 10th Amendments do NOT in fact exist. I could have just as easilly picked a hundred different proofs. There is some hope that a new Supreme Court might revive them if Stevens could get replaced in the next year or so, but I wouldn't actually bet it on.

The 2nd, despite the best efforts of the NRA, is gone; the fundamental right it enshrined has been replaced by sporadic gifts from the State of a license to bear (certain, very select) arms, revokable at the whim of the State.

The 1st, if any doubt remained of it's effectiveness, was snuffed out when Bush signed the McCain/Fiengold Campaign Finance Reform Act.

Need I go on? Many think the 4th is fading fast (Patriot Act among many other reasons) The 6th can't be said to hold unless you can say with a straight face the courts give ANYONE a 'speedy trial'. The civil judgement against OJ clearly violated Amendment 7 (A jury decided he didn't kill his ex, so a later ruling he was liable for the death clearly violated.) and was upheld. etc.

> But I agree with you, we do not enjoy a natural or legal right to be
> provided with a certain kind of computer and software.

If the original Constituition still held then we wouldn't have a Right to be 'provided' a certain kind of computer but we danged well would have the Right to make/sell/buy/possess/use one. A Supreme Court composed of Originalists would laugh at the DMCA and roll on the floor laughing when the inevitable attempt is eventually made to outlaw non TCPA hardware. Which is why we have to fight to restore the Old Republic, so we can become Free Citizens again instead of Consumers.

Restore the Old Republic

Posted Dec 6, 2005 0:22 UTC (Tue) by jwb (guest, #15467) [Link] (9 responses)

This is your second psuedo-libertarian rant in two days. Although I appreciate that you are also a subscriber and supporter of LWN, I get the feeling that the readers in general might prefer if you left that topic for a political website.

Restore the Old Republic

Posted Dec 6, 2005 11:52 UTC (Tue) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link] (1 responses)

Yes, please. The right to bear tactical nuclear missiles and the right to reenact the Waco Branch Davidian massacre at your own home are of no interest here.

Restore the Old Republic

Posted Dec 18, 2005 22:21 UTC (Sun) by nailed23 (guest, #34627) [Link]

fat chance that his comments about the 2nd amendment doesn't interrest you but he still have the right to say it.

Restore the Old Republic

Posted Dec 6, 2005 21:15 UTC (Tue) by jmorris42 (guest, #2203) [Link] (6 responses)

A lot of the issues we are facing in the tech world are the result of becoming important enough to show up on the radar of the political world. You can only ignore politics if it is willing to ignore you back. Those days are long gone. The only political structure compatible with the generally held beliefs of most tech types is libertarian even if most tend towards socialism out of ignorance. Don't like the DMCA or the eventual law that will mandate TCPA? Well you can't build a reasoned argument against either unless you start from the assumption that we are Free Citizens entitled to be treated as non-criminals and that there are things the State simply cannot be permitted to do. So long as you think the State Enthroned is morally acceptable you have to abide by it's decision that those things we hate are in the best interest of the State and that it, and it alone, has the moral authority to make these decisions for you.

I assert that things are bad generally with our Republic and have been for a couple of generations. And that any attempt to fend off the DRM Hell that is being planned for us needs to start with the basics, restore the Old Republic and the Constituitional limits to State power that would make abominations like the DMCA unthinkable. Trying to kill off each attempt piecemeal is doomed to failure in the longterm, our foes are much better organized and financed, have a lot of power and money at stake and appear to have little moral compuctions about playing dirty. We have to bat 1000, they only need to hit a single time. We have to change the rules of the game.

Restore the Old Republic

Posted Dec 6, 2005 21:49 UTC (Tue) by Baylink (guest, #755) [Link]

I thought this was a *wonderful* assessment of the problem, sir; thanks.

Restore the Old Republic

Posted Dec 8, 2005 9:14 UTC (Thu) by dvdeug (subscriber, #10998) [Link] (4 responses)

Of course; everyone who disagrees with does so out of ignorance, and everyone needs to hear your brilliant lectures even if they are off-topic.

BTW, even the most strict reading of the Commerce Clause would give Congress the power to prohibit interstate trafficing in things the DCMA prohibits.

Restore the Old Republic

Posted Dec 8, 2005 11:02 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Further, a lot of us aren't governed by the US Constitution at all. Personally I'd rather not see the Old Republic in the UK reestablished: Cromwell was an unpleasant man, and his followers were equally unpleasant religious fanatics who did immense damage to architecture.

Plus I like my Christmas and don't want him back to ban it again.

Restore the Old Republic

Posted Dec 10, 2005 22:12 UTC (Sat) by jmorris42 (guest, #2203) [Link] (2 responses)

> BTW, even the most strict reading of the Commerce Clause would give
> Congress the power to prohibit interstate trafficing in things the DCMA
> prohibits.

Wrong on two counts. The Commerce Clause has been horribly abused of late to attempt to justify things that are blatently unconstituitional. Most attempts to use the Commerce Clause to control anything other than interstate tariffs, shipping, etc are abuses.

But even if you were correct as to the original intent of the writers of the Commerce Clause, the Bill of Rights are AMENDMENTS and therefore superceed anything in the original. "Congress shall make no law...." is pretty blunt. Code IS speech and attempts to supress publishing the source of DeCSS are so obviously an infringement of the First Amendment that only a moron or a "Constituitional Scholar" could fail to see it.

Restore the Old Republic

Posted Dec 11, 2005 6:17 UTC (Sun) by dvdeug (subscriber, #10998) [Link] (1 responses)

I don't care about how the Commerce Clause has been abused. It clearly gives Congress the right to control interstate commerce, which would naturally include the right to ban things from being sold across state lines.

As for your reading of the First Amendment, it does not accord with the reading given by the "Old Republic", which passed the Alien and Sedition Acts.

Most code is not any more expressive than a car's engine. People didn't want to copy DeCSS to read it or understand an opinion behind it; they wanted to use it as a tool. Burning a flag to protest the president is protected speech; burning flags to power your generator isn't.

Your attitude that only a moron would disagree with you is the real problem, though. Just because some disagree with you doesn't mean they're ignorant or stupid. Frequently, they have good reasons for their opinions, and discussing it with them instead of insulting them may be enlightening. You're not convincing anyone of anything they didn't believe to begin with; you're just offending them.

Restore the Old Republic

Posted Dec 16, 2005 20:22 UTC (Fri) by Baylink (guest, #755) [Link]

> Burning a flag to protest the president is protected speech; burning flags to power your generator isn't.

No, but it's not *illegal*, either.

Restore the Old Republic

Posted Dec 6, 2005 7:34 UTC (Tue) by job (guest, #670) [Link]

This news site has an international audience and if you are to rant about your national constitution, please make sure that (a) you describe the background well enough so we foreigners get some background and (b) make sure it has some connection to Linux or at least digital technology in general, otherwise it's just noise to us.

Restore the Old Republic

Posted Dec 9, 2005 17:40 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (guest, #1954) [Link] (2 responses)

The civil judgement against OJ clearly violated Amendment 7 (A jury decided he didn't kill his ex, so a later ruling he was liable for the death clearly violated.)

I have to correct a common misstatement that makes people misunderstand the OJ case: A jury did not decide he didn't kill his ex. Jurors said in interviews after the trial that they thought he did. (And who wouldn't?). Jurors were instructed to decide whether the prosecutor had proved, and done so beyond a reasonable doubt, that OJ killed his ex. Someone can fail to prove something even if it is true. And someone can believe something but still reserve reasonable doubts.

Not that this matters to your argument. The Double Jeopardy clause of the 7th Amendment doesn't say two trials can't come to different conclusions; it says there can't even be a second trial.

I can see that you aren't terribly open to alternative ways of viewing things (so you must really hate lawyers), but lots and lots of smart people believe that the fact tried in OJ's first trial was not the same fact that was tried in the second. And I believe the folks who wrote the Bill Of Rights would say they believed that too.

Restore the Old Republic

Posted Dec 10, 2005 22:24 UTC (Sat) by jmorris42 (guest, #2203) [Link] (1 responses)

> I can see that you aren't terribly open to alternative ways of viewing
> things (so you must really hate lawyers), but lots and lots of smart
> people believe that the fact tried in OJ's first trial was not the same
> fact that was tried in the second.

Yes I do hate laywers, they are a wicked and depraved subspecied that devolved from H. Sapiens about a hundred years ago. ;) But that is beside the point.

As a matter of fact I'm convinced OJ did indeed kill those people, but unless I am ready to declare a revolution and attempt to replace our form of Government, the basic responsibilities of Citizenship require certain things of me. One of those is respecting the verdicts of juries, and a jury of OJ's peers duly declared him to be "Not Guilty" and that has to be that as far as any legally binding decisions. That verdict should have been more than enough to end the civil trial. Simply submit the verdict from the criminal court and the judge should have brought the case to an end with "OJ didn't kill em, he therefore cannot be liable for these deaths. Period, full stop."

YOu can't 'have other ways of viewing' these things, you either respect our system of justice and abide by it's verdicts or you don't, viewing it as just a system to be gamed for benefit. Now I would like to see the system improved, so obvious mistakes like OJ's case happen less often, but that is an entirely different matter from saying I reserve the right to ignore court rulings I don't like.

(And yes I do reserve that right to ignore the system, but as overt acts of Civil Disobediance in which I accept the possibility of prosecution and even punishment.)

Restore the Old Republic

Posted Dec 11, 2005 19:09 UTC (Sun) by giraffedata (guest, #1954) [Link]

I must repeat that the first OJ jury did not say that OJ didn't kill 'em.

I didn't bring it up before because I assumed that someone who can cite the Constitution would be aware of this one crucial difference between a criminal verdict and a civil one in US law, but since you haven't mentioned it, I'm starting to doubt it: Standard of proof.

In a criminal trial the jury must find "beyond a reasonable doubt and to a moral certainty" that the facts supporting conviction are true. In a civil trial the jury must merely find that the facts supporting the plaintiff are proven by "a preponderance of the evidence," i.e. it's more likely than not that they're true.

It makes plenty of sense that there are two standards. In a criminal trial, the defendant has much to lose and the People little to lose if the verdict is wrong. In a civil trial, each side has an equal amount to lose.

It may interest you to know that the double-trial thing doesn't happen in the opposite direction. If you take a criminal conviction verdict into a civil trial, the judge will consider it essentially conclusive proof; he won't even bother to ask a civil jury about those facts. That's because if it's proven beyond a reasonable doubt, then it's also proven by a preponderance of the evidence.

Relevance of US constitution

Posted Dec 10, 2005 17:31 UTC (Sat) by BackSeat (guest, #1886) [Link]

What does the US constitution have to do with this?

Answer: nothing (unless you live in America, possibly).

Linux in a binary world... a doomsday scenario

Posted Dec 6, 2005 1:18 UTC (Tue) by Baylink (guest, #755) [Link] (7 responses)

Dmax has it right.

Free Speech doesn't mean a damn if you can't *exercise* it.

In this world, that means communications.

While I don't necessarily feel that there are people in big corporations rubbing their hands together and plotting the downfall of free speech (I like my tinfoil hat painted black, for minimum reflection, thanks :-), that does *not* mean that that isn't a likely end.

And, not to sound overly anti-republican or anything, but don't assume that large corporations aren't, more or less purposefully, operating at the behest of the government, more or less formally.

> the few rights it does grant have no enforcement mechanism (other than citizens taking up arms en masse and revolting).

Yup. I'm not fond of the Second American Revolution.

But I don't think it's impossible, either.

It's the only *real* brake on the whole thing, though, isn't it?

I'm frankly amazed the assassinations haven't started already. Oh, yeah; right: the Democrats are the ones who are pro-gun-"control".

Linux in a binary world... a doomsday scenario

Posted Dec 6, 2005 3:30 UTC (Tue) by NightMonkey (subscriber, #23051) [Link] (4 responses)

I'm frankly amazed the assassinations haven't started already. Oh, yeah; right: the Democrats are the ones who are pro-gun-"control".

Um, lets keep talk of assasinations off of LWN, please? Thanks.

Linux in a binary world... a doomsday scenario

Posted Dec 6, 2005 3:41 UTC (Tue) by Baylink (guest, #755) [Link]

You're right, of course.

If an admin sees this, please feel free to clip it out.

Linux in a binary world... a doomsday scenario

Posted Dec 6, 2005 9:40 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (2 responses)

As opposed to killfiling people, which is of course still acceptable ;)

It's a shame that we can't killfile politicians, isn't it?

Posted Dec 7, 2005 4:11 UTC (Wed) by Baylink (guest, #755) [Link] (1 responses)

Though I think that's precisely the point jmorris was making above.

It's a shame that we can't killfile politicians, isn't it?

Posted Dec 8, 2005 11:04 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Sorry, I couldn't see a point in his rantings, which as far as I could understand them struck me as impractical at best; no man is an island and if you try to ban government from some sphere to keep it from growing overweeningly powerful you get overweeningly powerful private actors there instead. I consider them every bit as dangerous...

Linux in a binary world... a doomsday scenario

Posted Dec 7, 2005 5:58 UTC (Wed) by zblaxell (subscriber, #26385) [Link] (1 responses)

How does one tell if governments are operating at the behest of corporations, or the other way around?

Linux in a binary world... a doomsday scenario

Posted Dec 9, 2005 3:54 UTC (Fri) by allesfresser (guest, #216) [Link]

They're both just pointers to the same object.

Linux in a binary world... a doomsday scenario

Posted Dec 6, 2005 6:08 UTC (Tue) by dvdeug (subscriber, #10998) [Link] (1 responses)

But there is arguably an constutional right to do what you will with your own property. To say that the US constitution guarentees very little misreads it; it was designed to narrowly specify what the government could do, not specify what it can't.

Constitutional right to do what you will with your property

Posted Dec 9, 2005 17:09 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (guest, #1954) [Link]

there is arguably an constitutional right to do what you will with your own property.

Actually, this isn't worded properly. By the definition of property, you have the right to do what you will with your own property. What the US Constitution does is shore up (but not create) the right of individuals to own property. (4th, 5th, and 14th Amendments limit the government's power to take property).

Truths to be self-evident ... unalienable rights

Posted Dec 9, 2005 9:58 UTC (Fri) by AnswerGuy (guest, #1256) [Link] (1 responses)

One observation I like to make when discussions of the U.S. Constitution are bandies about.

People speak far too often of the U.S. Constitution as "granting" certain rights. However, it's wise to read more this in the context of some words from the preamble of the Declaration of Independence:

Therein they describe certain truths as "self-evident" and certain rights as "unalienable."

In that context it seems self-evident that the framers of the constitution intended the Bill of Rights to be an enumeration of "unalienable" rights.

In other words this document should not be taken as "GRANTING" these rights. Rather they RECOGNIZED.

Of course this is a nitpick.

The Constitution is a flawed document. However, in practice it's alot better then what we've been using.

There have been numerous periods where the Bill of Rights have been trampled ... starting perhaps with the Sedition Act of 1798 (less than a decade after the U.S. Constitution took effect).

I'm no historian. However, I've read a bit and listened to those who've read alot more.

We seem to be slipping inexorably towards the sort of corporate totalitarianism that characterized the coal mining "company towns" that play such a significant and bloody role in the history of the labor movement.

This is relevant to LWN because computing devices are increasingly pervasive and necessary to modern life and there is a concerted effort to make them more capable of enforcing policies of a small number of conglomerates. The recent Sony DRM fiasco is one another little blip (not truly the beginning of this) along an alarming trend.

Jim

Truths to be self-evident ... unalienable rights

Posted Dec 9, 2005 14:50 UTC (Fri) by Duncan (guest, #6647) [Link]

Mindful that LWN is read internationally, and most of this has little if
anything to do with Linux or FLOSS directly, but unable to resist, I'll
comment, but keep it short (for me)...

Note that the US Declaration of Independence, while a noble document
(those with an interest in psychology will note that it's one of the few
documents existing at stage 5, with a few stage 6 arguments, of the
Kohlberg moral ladder, while most legal documents remain at stage 4, by
definition of the stage as a society/legal orientation, Martin Luther
King, Jr.'s "I have a Dream" speech being one of the few examples of a
full length public stage-6 document), does not obtain
the force of law in the US. Rather, it's only force of law is as
implemented in the US Constitution, which can be seen as the practical
document legally implementing the ideals of the Declaration of
Independence. Unfortunately but arguably practically, the US Constitution
falls short of the ideals of the US Declaration of Independence, without
the lofty references to "pursuit of happiness", for instance, and with the
references to life and liberty considerably toned down -- not quite so
"inalienable" after all, in practice, tho they are still considered
"rights" and their removal must be for cause and after due process.

I remember how disappointed I was upon finding this out... It's certainly
not the simplistic view many of us were taught (indoctrinated with?) early
in our educational life.

Perhaps, if there are those interested in further discussion, someone will
reply with a link to a more appropriate forum, some list, other web forum,
or (preferred for me) perhaps a newsgroup.

Duncan

The very first part of the scenario is bogus

Posted Dec 5, 2005 23:54 UTC (Mon) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link] (4 responses)

The bogus part is the idea that the enterprise distributions will sign up to support binary-only kernel modules. Why would they? Doing so is a promise to keep vital systems running even if third party code that they cannot debug repeatedly crashes the system.

The very first part of the scenario is bogus

Posted Dec 6, 2005 0:47 UTC (Tue) by Yorick (guest, #19241) [Link]

Wouldn't it be possible for the company doing the distribution to have access to the module
sources under a non-disclosure agreement?

The very first part of the scenario is bogus

Posted Dec 6, 2005 4:24 UTC (Tue) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link]

> Why would they?

To make money, lots of it. Imagine vendors like HP, Dell or IBM promising a distributor big bucks for shipping (supporting, allowing etc.) a binary module that supports their hardware only. Something along the lines of Compaq EFS for SCO OpenServer - the stuff that you could get only for Compaq machines under SCO OpenServer. Greed does funny things to people...

The very first part of the scenario is bogus

Posted Dec 6, 2005 7:40 UTC (Tue) by fenrus (guest, #31654) [Link] (1 responses)

actually both RH and SuSE do support binary modules... for certain modules/vendors they have cross support agreements with.

That part isn't fictional or even "future".

The very first part of the scenario is bogus

Posted Dec 9, 2005 15:06 UTC (Fri) by Duncan (guest, #6647) [Link]

Indeed. Mandrake did (and I imagine Mandriva does) as well. They ship
quite a bit of binary-only stuff, kernel modules, codecs, additional
software, in their "paid" versions, that they can't legally distribute in
their free for download versions.

That's actually one of the reasons I switched to the downloadable
versions, because otherwise, I was subsidizing non-free software. If I
had ANY interest in doing that, I'd still be on MSWormOS, as dumping it in
favor of Linux after a decade on the proprietary platform was no easy
task.

Eventually, I ended up on Gentoo, a community distribution, in part due to
the aftermath of trying to find an appropriate amd64 version of Mandrake
to purchase, showing my support while *NOT* subsidizing
"masters-over-me-ware". Yes, Gentoo has ebuilds for a lot of
proprietaryware, but I can avoid them (often, they'd require separate
manual downloads anyway), and as a community distribution, I can more
freely contribute, without worrying that any part of my contribution is
subsidizing closed source, except by a most tenuous of indirect threads,
that's very nearly impossible to avoid.

With a lot of distributions, the non-freedomware they ship with the paid
version is one of the big selling points contrasting it to the
downloadable version, particularly for low-cost versions that include
little or no bundled support.

Fortunately and by legal necessity, most at minimum put the slaveryware on
a separate disk, often called the "bonus" disk, or something similar, to
denote it can't be obtained in the downloadable version.

Duncan

Let's simplify

Posted Dec 6, 2005 2:42 UTC (Tue) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link] (4 responses)

Linux + binary drivers == "Open"Solaris situation (i.e. what I like to call half-source, or even better half-arsed-source :-).

Don't go there, don't do it, don't even think about it. It's a trap.

Keep drivers in source form (don't listen to Sun-like binary talk - they have a different agenda). Make people aware things will and should break if they don't release the source of their drivers. Tell NVidias and ATIs of this world that what they are doing is NOT OK.

Let's simplify

Posted Dec 6, 2005 9:56 UTC (Tue) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link] (1 responses)

What about FreeBSD?

Let's simplify

Posted Dec 6, 2005 10:34 UTC (Tue) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link]

Half of FreeBSD comes as a binary only tarball, centrally controlled by a single company? I wasn't aware of that.

Let's simplify

Posted Dec 6, 2005 17:35 UTC (Tue) by beoba (guest, #16942) [Link] (1 responses)

Its a trap!

Let's simplify

Posted Dec 8, 2005 21:28 UTC (Thu) by mto (guest, #24123) [Link]

Funny! I missed the communications disruption!

What about the Linux compatible hardware market ?

Posted Dec 6, 2005 17:09 UTC (Tue) by copsewood (subscriber, #199) [Link] (1 responses)

Surely there are now enough people using Linux in the world to create a large enough market to profit those providing Linux compatible hardware ? This article investigates a risk that people will be able to get higher margins through proprietary drivers supporting proprietary features. However, most purchasers are interested in buying hardware which is cost effective, durable and reliable. This applies to the Windows related hardware market as much as Linux. How can hardware be described as reliable across a wide range of applications and in combination with a wide range of other hardware and software unless it is subject to open review and well tested ?

As Linux is relatively strong in the server market compared with the workstation market, we are more likely to see proprietary binary-only protection of hardware features in:

a. The very low cost hardware market - where reliability is traded off against cost. This happened with Winmodems, the cost cutting occuring by moving functionality previously in hardware into software. This doesn't apply to servers, because the cost of Windows licenses prevents Windows servers being low cost compared to Linux servers.

b. Hardware very specific to workstations and little used on servers, e.g. 3D graphics cards.

Having better information available for Linux-related hardware purchases is essential if the potential influence of Linux buyers on the hardware market is to be maximised. In practice I suspect that this influence is greater than the number of PCs and servers actually running Linux would suggest, because very many Windows users are likely to ask Linux users for advice on hardware purchases. E.G. it would be irresponsible for me to recommend a purchase for intended Windows-only use in respect of hardware likely to suffer poor future support and be unreliable (including on Windows) due to the hardware driver interface not being subject to open critical comment and review.

A Windows hardware recommendation is of more value to the Windows user if the latter is not permanently locked in by this recommendation to running a particular version of Windows at a particular service pack level.

What about the Linux compatible hardware market ?

Posted Dec 7, 2005 7:27 UTC (Wed) by zblaxell (subscriber, #26385) [Link]

A few very large purchasers are interested in buying hardware that is *certified* to be cost effective, durable, and reliable. If you have sufficiently deep pockets, you can certify any old crap as long as it has a hope in hell of working--if you were wrong, you have to pay for some warranty replacements or patches for the really severe problems, but otherwise your risk is negligible.

The trouble with certifications is that they are primarily a legal construct, so they come with lawyers who want to approve all changes to everything. Try doing that when the code changes every two minutes, by people against whom you have no recourse, in ways that you don't really control. This is why some people like binary-only drivers: they ultimately minimize all possibility of change other than what is convenient for the vendor, and they consider this to be a *good* thing.

It must be a major pain in the butt to make hardware for Linux people. We want to run our own software on it (even if the vendor writes the original version of that software). We want to optimize the hell out of it. We want to drive hardware X using the device driver architecture of hardware Y. We want to mix and match strategies from a variety of different products so that the best software is talking to whatever hardware we have. We want to have features in our device drivers that nobody else has heard of, and sometimes that nobody else understands. We want to use network cards as serial ports, video cards as communications devices, and hard disks as game controls. We want continuous support for hardware long after it has been purchased. We expect all of this to be included in the cost of the hardware. It would probably be easier for the vendors if they understood that we're also willing to do all of that work ourselves, and we're not waiting to launch a patent lawsuit against them.

Alright, BUT.

Posted Dec 6, 2005 19:43 UTC (Tue) by dash2 (guest, #11869) [Link] (9 responses)

Fair enough this seems a worry, but I just want to be the dissenter here. What the community has now is not working. I speak as a 5 year Linux user whose next computer will run Windows. Why? Because I'd rather have their half-assed binary drivers, written by hardware companies who don't know how to, than no driver at all because (1) the hardware company would have to lose IP so (2) we wait for a private individual to write a driver but (3) even when someone does, it takes ages to get into the kernel and longer still into distributions.

The desktop is OK and the UI is improving a lot but I am just sick and tired of spending days to make hardware work. My idealism has run out.

Still

Posted Dec 6, 2005 21:35 UTC (Tue) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link]

Mmmm... if you have used Linux for 5 years you will know that there is a lot of hardware out there that works perfectly. Maybe you have to spend a little more money, but the results are usually better too.

Can't use a lame winmodem? Buy a real one. Your dirt-cheap printer doesn't work? Find a better one; HP has had free drivers for ages. Lack of wifi support? Buy a good access point. Even for graphics cards I read that Intel has pretty good 3d support. There are laptop manufacturers with good records. And you can also pressure your favorite hardware brand to support Linux; it works sometimes.

But whatever. Using Windows is not a stigma, you know; I'm forced to use it every day at work and do not feel dirty or anything, it's just worse. When you are ready to switch back, you will be welcome.

Alright, BUT.

Posted Dec 7, 2005 0:11 UTC (Wed) by jmorris42 (guest, #2203) [Link] (3 responses)

> I am just sick and tired of spending days to make hardware work.

Dude! You claim to have been running Linux for five years and can make a statement like that? When you are running linux you make sure any hardware you buy is supported, and after five years you should be rid of any legacy stuff you happened to already have when you switched so that isn't a valid excuse.

Buy known good hardware and you can have a very pleasant install experience. The only fly in the ointment is 3D. Sure, as another poster already mentioned, Intel's shared memory junk is supported but ATI[1] & Nvidia aren't so you have to muck with that one issue.

[1] Yes I know there are Free drivers for older (but very servicable) hardware in x.org's tree. But I have tried using it for years and after a couple of hard lockups go download the driver from ATI.

Alright, BUT.

Posted Dec 7, 2005 13:42 UTC (Wed) by bk (guest, #25617) [Link]

The free DRI radeon driver is pretty stable in my experience (but then again I only rarely play games). I read somewhere that a new free R300 driver was just released in the xorg tree for newer ATI chips, so the situation is slowly improving.

Alright, BUT.

Posted Dec 16, 2005 10:27 UTC (Fri) by dash2 (guest, #11869) [Link]

Thanks for your comments - both you and the poster above. It is true that if I always only buy specific hardware then it will usually work on Linux. (For some values of "work". It will very often not have a reasonable GUI.) But for example, why should I spend money on an external modem? Why can't I use the "crappy winmodem" on my laptop? You're telling me about freedom but I don't see any advantages, just costs.

Free 3D drivers

Posted Dec 18, 2005 11:32 UTC (Sun) by anton (subscriber, #25547) [Link]

>The only fly in the ointment is 3D. Sure, as another poster already
>mentioned, Intel's shared memory junk is supported but ATI[1] & Nvidia
>aren't so you have to muck with that one issue.

Actually, there are free 3D drivers for ATI R100 and R200 based
graphics cards, i.e., Radeon 9250 and below.

There are people working on R300, but AFAIK that's without getting the
programming information from ATI, so if you want to vote with your
wallet, stick with the R200-based cards (and don't buy Nvidia).

Alright, BUT.

Posted Dec 7, 2005 1:58 UTC (Wed) by beoba (guest, #16942) [Link]

What you're forgetting is that your hardware, while it may work fine in Windows right now, has a moderate probability of being broken in the future, when the manufacturer decides it's not worth the effort to maintain drivers for products that they aren't selling anymore.

Alright, BUT.

Posted Dec 7, 2005 12:32 UTC (Wed) by rknop (guest, #66) [Link] (2 responses)

My idealism hasn't run out. I still try to buy and run things that work with free only drivers. But I'm getting increasingly tired trying to evangilize. "You keep saying Linux is so great," people tell me, "but it's so hard to get the computer working. What's great about that?" This is after they have to futz around downloading a bunch of binary drivers for their laptop. This is after installing Debian, only to find that they can't just upgrade the kernel, but have to go through a bunch of downloading again to make it all work. This is after finding out that some of the features just don't work. "Why don't you just run Windows?."

Or they're submitting a proposal, and it has to be in Word format, and OpenOffice.org is (for whatever reason) formatting it less efficiently so they get fewer words per page than they do with Word. The call comes to have a Windows machine available for all the students to use. (I say, sure, do what you want, but I will have nothing to do with it.)

And, society has become so jaded and cynical that any talk of "freedom" makes me sound like a silly crazed zealot. Never mind that every so often I've got a practical point that makes it clear that freedom is important. (E.g., last week in Chile, a couple of students weren't able to do the homework assignment they had thought they could do in IDL because the school wasn't letting external connections to the port that the license server was running on.) By and large, maintaining freedom nowadays seems, at least, to introduce more hassles than being tied to propreitary stuff, and I've not succeeded in making the long-term arguments about selling out your flexibility to proprietary vendors. I crow when I can about situations like this IDL situation, but too often the hassles seem to go the other way.

In the early days of Linux, it was often hard to get free drivers for Linux because Linux wasn't on anybody's radar. Of course, back then, you were a bit more likely to get specs on hardware than you are now, but it wasn't always true. (Remember when laptops didn't work with free X for a while because of the NeoMagic chipset?) Nowadays, it's getting harder to get free drivers for Linux because too many companies think that putting out binary drivers is a reasonable solution. I can't help but wonder if Linux is big enough now that the lkml people should start throwing their weight around, and explicitly disallow binary modules. That will break the hardware of companies that won't play at all with the free software communiyt. And, yes, it will be a pain for the people who have a laptop and say, "hey, I want to try Linux!" But for those who plan ahead, it will help publicize the fact that only some hardware really works with Linux.

I dunno. It's a pain in the butt and a thorny issue. And the fact that so many people in "technical" physics (I'm thinking Physics grad students here) are now coming in thinking they're computer literate because they use Windows IM and IE, and if they've programmed they've used MATLAB or IDL or something else proprietary on Windows, the pressure from the geeks is making it harder and harder for zealots like me to keep free software a seeming necessity.

I just wish one could argue for freedom out loud without sounding silly.

-Rob

Alright, BUT.

Posted Dec 7, 2005 22:44 UTC (Wed) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link]

Exactly what I feel every day at work too. The battle for freedom is an uphill one. I'm lucky enough that people around me are old Unix hands, so pointing out that source is the ultimate "everything" when it comes to software is relatively easy.

But what about regular folks that only care if the system works or not? How to convince them that having a slow driver for their NVidia graphics chip, that doesn't support 3D and/or dual head on the same card is better than the latest and greatest proprietary driver? And how to convince them that a system that requires manual intervention on a kernel change (not that they wuold know what that means anyway) is better than the one that doesn't? Unfortunately, I don't know the answer to this question. Not without sounding silly from their point of view. For them, their computer is just like their mobile phone, TV, fridge or the car. They want it to be cheap to buy and run and to be reliable and hassle free. All else is a non-issue.

As I posted above, I'm all for full source drivers. But I'm not so sure where and how the pressure needs to be applied to convince hardware manufacturers to drop binary only drivers.

If only there was one manufacturer that openly supports Linux, like IBM or HP, that had a complete line of products that work 100% with vanilla Linux, at least there would a "fallback" plan. At least we could say that if you want a 100% free Linux OS, you can buy models of PDAs, notebooks, desktops, workstations and servers from them, where every imaginable hardware feature is turned on and works. A bit like what Apple does with their systems, only with vanilla Linux.

I know. I should keep dreaming...

Alright, BUT.

Posted Dec 9, 2005 16:10 UTC (Fri) by Duncan (guest, #6647) [Link]

> I can't help but wonder if Linux is big
> enough now that the lkml people should
> start throwing their weight around, and
> explicitly disallow binary modules.

A number of kernel developers, most notably Greg KH, have predicted that
this will practically be the case, in a few years. They ARE gradually
tightening down on it, and asserting themselves. A couple, with copyright
ownership enough to make it stick, have legal cease and desist orders
pending against certain distributions for shipping binary modules on the
same media as the kernel, violating the legal requirements of the GPL, and
there's the (successful) efforts of the German guy (forgot his name)
that's behind the netfilter stuff to get source released for the various
stuff on routers and the like using it. Likewise, more and more of the
newer kernel functions are being exported GPL_ONLY, and while few of the
older functions are being actively restricted to GPL_ONLY, a fair portion
are now deprecated and will eventually be removed from the kernel.

Note the references in the original article to "glue" code. Both ATI and
NVidia use BSD source licensed glue code to interface their binary-only
core with the kernel, using the BSD licensed code as a "glue" layer, as do
certain other "binary-only" module providers. This accomplishes a number
of things, both legally and technically.

First, the legal side, BSD licensed code, because it's less restrictive
than the GPL, is GPL compatible, so it can freely link the kernel without
issue. Second, BSD code, unlike GPL, allows itself to be taken
proprietary or to link with the binary-only core as it does in these
cases. Third, as long as it's the user that links the compiled core/glue
combo into the kernel, /and/ as long as it was shipped separately from the
kernel, many legal minds hold that no violation of the GPL has occurred,
because the GPL applies to distribution, end-users are free to use it as
they see fit.

Legally, there's still the issue of whether the combined unit is "derived"
from the kernel and therefore subject to the non-distribution clause, even
separately, but that's a very controversial gray area, at this point, with
the current situation basically being an agreement not to specifically say
one way or the other, thereby letting the practice continue in this gray
area. It's anyone's guess how a court would resolve it, if it came to
that, but it's currently in enough folks' interests on both sides not to
let it come to that at this point.

Practically, this glue code model is what allows the core to be
dynamically matched to any arbitrary kernel out there, tho the glue code
must be recompiled in ordered to do so. That's what allows such modules
to be used on other than kernels officially supported by the hardware
manufacturer, for which precompiled modules are available for download.
Were it not for this glue code, only those manufacturer supported kernels,
and those "close enough" to work even if not supported, would work with
these binary modules, which is the situation many who do /not/ use this
glue-code method find themselves in.

Within 2-3 years, it's going to become /very/ difficult for the
non-glue-code folks to ship binary modules, technically. Probably at
about the same point, legal enforcement efforts will be stepped up to the
point where it becomes nigh impossible to distribute them anyway, save for
locations where copyright laws aren't enforced to any serious degree
anyway.

It'll remain possible altho less and less practical, and less and less
approved of within the community, for glue code folks to ship binary
modules, for some time. At some point, most will probably give in and
stop shipping them, either providing at least limited support/cooperation
on open drivers, or leaving the Linux market. The idea from the Linux
side is to have a large enough market share by then that it won't be
feasible to leave that market share on the table, and we'll get proper (if
limited) open specifications or drivers.

Ultimately the glue code legality question will probably be resolved in
court as well, but note that particularly where the same core can be shown
to be used on other OS platforms, especially where said core is developed
for those other platforms at the same time or first, it's going to
be /very/ hard to argue that the same is "derived" code. Of course, if
the glue code is held to be derived, as is MUCH more likely, then it can
be held to be required to have the GPL license itself, and linking to the
binary core as it must do would then become very iffy, at best. Even
then, however, that code would be owned by whoever authored it, presumably
the hardware manufacturers, and they can't be obligated to relicense under
the GPL. What they *CAN* legally be obligated to do, however, is to stop
shipping said code, because it's derived from GPL licensed code, and
therefore, according to the GPL, cannot be shipped at all if it cannot be
shipped under the same license. (Note that the loophole used for more
permissive licenses such as BSD, is that because they are more permissive,
they allow shipping under the less permissive GPL as well. If it were
held that the BSD license was invalid because the code was in fact derived
from GPL licensed code, and thus /cannot/ be shipped under the more
permissive license, then that loophole would disappear. In any case,
however, it could only be the distributor held liable, NOT the user, as
the user can always use the software, under the GPL, tho /not/ always
distribute it, but users don't normally distribute the kernel complete
with loaded-in modules, anyway -- nobody does.)

Anyway, things are likely to get pretty interesting in the next few years,
if the tightening trend continues as it has the last few years.

Duncan

It's already happening !

Posted Dec 6, 2005 20:40 UTC (Tue) by Thibs (guest, #34375) [Link]

Frankly, it's not very far from the situation we have today ! Indeed, look at Red Hat, what are they doing ? They just tell hardware vendor the following :

"Dear <Hardware_manufacturer>, we understand that your IP is important and that linux kernel developers are not willing to let you easily integrate closed source drivers into the kernel. May we propose you to certify your closed source driver on our latest RHEL<X> ? This way, you address around 90% of the Linux corporate market and you have the insurance that your driver will not have to redeveloped during the 7 years our product is supported. Does that seem a good deal to you ?"

This is what is happening right now and it begins to worry customers who fear the lock-in that may result from the use of Red Hat "proprietary" kernel on the long run. Indeed, how similar will the vanilla linux kernel and RHEL3 linux kernel be in 7 years ? Red Hat is becoming too dominant on the market, it's time a new player arise !

Linux in a binary world... a doomsday scenario

Posted Dec 7, 2005 12:19 UTC (Wed) by rknop (guest, #66) [Link] (3 responses)

While a year earlier people would have to give up 3D acceleration for this often, now even 2D doesn't work without binary drivers, nor does networking (both fixed wire or wireless) or sound.

Isn't this often half-true already? At least if you're on a laptop. How common are the NVIDIA chips where you give up 3d? Yeah, we don't give up 2d yet, but people have become so inured to just using the NVIDIA binary modules that it's already not far off. People on my floor think I'm strange because I try to avoid buying anything NVIDIA, and try to buy cards that have open-source 3d support (which right now, as far as I can tell, means two-year-old ATI cards, and is getting harder and harder in laptops). And Centrino... I have two grad students who've got laptops, and despite my grumblng about it, I've downloaded the binary firmware blob to go with the drivers for the built-in wireless. No, not a fully "binary-only" module, but it's already (a) a pain, because the Debian kernel doesn't just support it, but requires futzing around to get it to work, and (b) disturbing, because it can't be in a source-only kernel. On one of the grad students' laptops, for a while this was also true for the wired ethernet; for a while, the tg3 drivers were not in the standard kernel because of some sort of related issue.

This scenario isn't a doomsday scenario, it sounds to me like simple and plausible extrapolation of where we are already.

-Rob

Linux in a binary world... a doomsday scenario

Posted Dec 7, 2005 17:00 UTC (Wed) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (2 responses)

For Laptops:

As far as laptops go just by Intel. Their Sonoma platform is fully supported by Linux OSS drivers.

Just buy 'centrino'. Just avoid buying anything with a ATI video card and Broadcom Wifi. If you have a broadcom wifi it can't be 'Centrino', but many people sell centrino laptops for one configuration and centrino-like for another.

A laptop with ATI graphics can still be called 'centrino', but you just have to watch out for that.

Their newer 'Graphic Media Accelerator' items are as fast as or a bit faster then the old ATI stuff.. and those Pentium-M cpus are, frankly, quite amazing.

Pentium-D and Pentium 4's suck realy badly, but a Pentium-M 1.7ghz is low-power and cool, but at the same time is just as powerfull as a 3200+ AMD64 cpu.

Since your buying a laptop with 'everything intel' you know they work well together and power management is nice. You should be able to get wifi working, suspend to ram and suspend to disk to work, and all that without any more effort then it takes to get Windows XP secure.

There are some lingering issues like some laptop's bioses and such still suck and make ACPI stuff difficult.. and with Wifi there is some issues with 'software switches' vs 'hardware switches' with Intel nics. There is special software for Linux to deal with it (open source of course)
http://rfswitch.sourceforge.net/

If there is any questions then avoid buying a 'consumer' style laptop and buy a 'business' style laptop. Business laptops tend to avoid all the gimmicks and add-ons that tend to make some laptops a pain in the ass to support.

Here is some more stuff:
http://tuxmobil.org/centrino.html

Out of all the major vendors HP probably has the best hardware support for Linux. On a few models of their notebooks they have specificly setup the hardware to make Linux compatability work well...

Their website sucks ass though.

Here is the installation instructions from HP regarding Suse Linux and Redhat on some nc4200, tc4200, nc6110, nc6120, nx6110, nx6120, nc6220, nc6230, nc8230, and nx8220 notebooks.
http://h10018.www1.hp.com/wwsolutions/linux/products/clie...

You may be able to find others.

You can buy these laptops with Windows XP-delete and get FreeDOS installed on them for a 100 dollar discount.. which you can use to configure for more memory and larger harddrive.

There are 2 problems.

Probem number one is:
When you get a very customized laptop you loose the discount they have on pre-built models. This means with FreeDOS on customized notebook it costs the sames as Windows XP on a more generic notebook.

Problem number 2 is:
finding the stupid thing on their website.

The solution to number 2 is to follow this navigation guide:
Goto www.hp.com
on the right hand side click on 'online shopping'
on the 'buy direct from hp' click on 'small and medium business store'
click on 'notebook and tablet PCs'
click on 'notebook'
click on 'thin and light' notebook.
scroll all the way to the right and select 'configurable thin and light'

That way you can do the "Local FreeDOS" option with the -100 cost and much more carefully select wifi stuff. AVOID Broadcom.

OK.

Now if you want the pre-built discount and want to get Windows (most people here, I assume, still have some use for it)

You want to select a normal notebook and get the standard setup. Select the 'recommended notebooks' options to get the lowest prices.

Just be very carefull. Some models will only come with broadcom wifi.

Probably be wise to call HP and specificly request models with intel wifi cards for the specific reasons that you want good Linux compatability.

I don't know how well they work or how nice these HP laptops are... but from what I've heard or read these things work very well with Linux. Power management and everything works almost right out of the box on newer versions of the distros.

Probably want to try one out first though.

If you want AMD notebook then you have to use propriatory drivers for 3d. There is no way around it.

However for Wireless get a Ralink rt2500-series MiniPCI card. Ralink released specs and drivers (GPL'd even!) for their wifi stuff.

Rt2x00 is a effort to rewrite them to get they running on the new generic linux ieee80211 protocol stack. (This should be very nice).

Meanwhile the OSS drivers work well on x86 platforms.

On my PPC laptop I had to use ported FreeBSD drivers (called Ural-Linux) drivers for the Ralink USB 802.11g wifi adapter.

For people that are stuck with broadcom crap or TI crap..
Linux kernel developers are going to break NDIS drivers! Not intentionally, but because of a policy of 'agressively ignore' thing they have going with binary drivers.

There is hope for you broadcom users:
https://lists.berlios.de/pipermail/bcm43xx-dev/2005-Decem...

Linux in a binary world... a doomsday scenario

Posted Dec 7, 2005 17:10 UTC (Wed) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

oh and before I forget:

For DESKTOPS:

Intel is much less desirable here.. mostly because AMD proccessors are SOOOO much nicer.

However I would like one for the specific reason that they have good hardware support. The fastest GMA integrated graphics you can get is with the 945 chipsets. I think the proccessor speed is around 400mhz. For 945 support you'd have to use the latest distros. The 915 driver may or may not work in earlier X.org versions.

For the 945 series motherboards you have to by ddr2 memory and stuff like that. I don't know about 915 boards. For 915 and 945 boards you have speed differences in the GMA chipset speeds. Goto Intel's websites because they have very good documentation on their boards and their features.

They also have nice advice (chassis engineering level) for buying heatsinks and fans. All this different stuff in PDF form. Like you have to get a 3-wire fans for the cpu hinksink to use Intel's onboard active fan controls. This allows your fan to scale along with your CPU to get quietest operation.

For AMD users you have integrated Via stuff, which is slow as slow can get.

The only workable option is to go with propriatory Nvidia stuff or 9200 and older ATI stuff.

With XGI there is a glimmer of hope...
They are thinking about releasing FULL OSS support for 3d graphics and everything for their 8300 series video card.

this is a low end video card designed mainly for low-heat, low-power stuff and multimedia. They claim superior image quality and that is their focus for these cards.

There is supposadly a 8500 series card to be released and these are the 'gamers' version of the card. They claim speed equivelent to 6800gt cards and whatnot.

So I guess email them and tell them what you feel about buying versus not buying their cards if they release OSS drivers.

Keep in mind that OSS drivers would probably be immature in the beginning and would take a few months to mature. That seems the track record for people spontaniously releasing OSS drivers for anything.

More information:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=32...

Oh, and don't forget about the OGP project.. Those guys making a video card specificly for Linux use.

This should be very fasinating for anybody interested in hardware hacking. For a price significantly more inexpensive then anything else you'd be able to get a very big FPGA proccessors and a 128megs of onboard RAM on a PCI or PCIe card... There is nothing else like this on the market. Should be great for hackers, hobbyiests, and educators.

Hell, with Sun releasing their Verilog stuff for the OpenSparc stuff maybe you can get a Sparc proccessor running on your PCI bus. :)

For everybody else they plan on releasing a ASIC version after the testing with the FPGA proccessor is over that should increase performance, reduce cost, and reduce heat.

Opengraphics wiki:
http://wiki.duskglow.com/tiki-index.php?page=Open-Graphics

hardware for laptops

Posted Dec 18, 2005 12:10 UTC (Sun) by anton (subscriber, #25547) [Link]

I have an Apple iBook G4 12" 1GHz (actually 1066MHz), and I am pretty
happy with it. The graphics is a Radeon Mobility 9200; I had some
trouble getting it to display on external displays, but that works
now. There is no WLAN built-in (with is just as good ad the
Broadcom-based Airport Extreme in newer iBooks), but I have bought a
Netgear MA111 USB stick; there is a free driver for that (prism2_usb
from linux-wlan-ng-0.2.2), but out-of-tree, and when I tried it, it
did not compile with the then-new 2.6.14 kernel (so I'm back to
2.6.9).

Of course, currently sold iBooks are somewhat different, so YMMV.

Linux in a binary world... a doomsday scenario

Posted Dec 8, 2005 15:20 UTC (Thu) by NRArnot (subscriber, #3033) [Link] (2 responses)

Wouldn't a bit of pragmatism be better than dogmatic adherence to the one true way (whatever you think that might be?)

I'm fairly happy to use the NVidia drivers because by and large they work, and more because I have at least two ways of doing without them should I need to (run a lower-performance open-source driver instead, or remove the graphics card and plug in something else). I'd be a lot less happy if it were a driver for something essential embedded on a motherboard, without which I culd not access my data. In fact, that would worry me so much I'd not buy that motherboard at all. But I'd also be very unhappy if it became impossible for vendors to offer limited co-operation with the OSS community for fear of releasing their trade secrets to their competitors.

A suggestion that might bridge a gap: software escrow. How about if manufacturers who do not want to reveal secrets to their competitors deposit the source of every binary blob they release with a trusted third party? There could be a standard agreement about what they need to do on a continuing basis in order to keep their sources secret. At some time they may decide that the product is obsolescent, the secrets no longer important to keep, and it is no longer in their interest to maintain the blobs - at that point the source would be released to the community. Because it's in escrow and because they had already signed a binding agreement, they could not go back on their word and land us with a big problem.

Such agreements are not uncommon in the closed-source proprietary world, to protect a business against the consequence of a key softwre supplier going bust or otherwise failing to provide adequate support.

Linux in a binary world... a doomsday scenario

Posted Dec 8, 2005 16:05 UTC (Thu) by fenrus (guest, #31654) [Link] (1 responses)

and then what?

if/when most of the binary modules are only available for RHEL or SLES, does it really matter that there's an escrow thing? NVidia and ATI are special in a way because they go through the trouble of making a special glue layer. Most others actually don't bother, and don't want to bother with a community with 15 different compilers and distros, and only do RHEL and SLES as a result.

And the NVidia *is* holding the kernel back already to some degree; several changes get blocked either directly because they break the current nvidia, or from fear to get dozens of hate mails from nvidia users..

Linux in a binary world... a doomsday scenario

Posted Dec 9, 2005 13:50 UTC (Fri) by bockman (guest, #3650) [Link]

NVidia and ATI are special in a way because they go through the trouble of making a special glue layer.

Maybe this should be unofficially indicated as the second best choice after releasing the full code. It allows kernel developers not to be API-bounded and allows hardware vendors to hide their supposedly-valuable IP in the binary blob. Meanwhile, the 'open' external layer allows third parties to fix things when the kernel API changes and/or the vendor drops support for the hardware.

I know that this still is not free software, and I am not saying that the external layers of such drivers should be part of official kernels. But at least, if most vendors would adopt this approach, things would be slightly better.

Ciao
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FB