Yes. Now nvidia sucks even more. [LWN.net]

Yes. Now nvidia sucks even more.

Posted Nov 24, 2008 18:30 UTC (Mon) by iabervon (subscriber, #722)
In reply to: Yes. Now nvidia sucks even more. by jch
Parent article: VIA releases chipset documentation

If only they were willing to freeze their firmware in immutable silicon on their products, we'd be satisfied! Or, rather, we wouldn't know there was more to ask for.

(Of course, it would be nice in an operational sense if Intel devices as shipped would work without needing something else to reconnect them with their binary blobs; that way, operating system distributors wouldn't have to distribute the blob that they can't modify. It might happen if demand for SSDs drives down the price of flash enough that it's cost effective to ship reasonable firmware blobs for on-board hardware in on-board flash instead of putting them on user-data block storage devices or driver CDs.)

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Yes. Now nvidia sucks even more.

Posted Nov 28, 2008 14:55 UTC (Fri) by jch (guest, #51929) [Link] (1 responses)

> If only they were willing to freeze their firmware in immutable silicon on their products, we'd be satisfied! Or, rather, we wouldn't know there was more to ask for.

Who ever said that?

The original IBM PC's BIOS was frozen in silicon. That didn't prevent smart people from reverse-engineering it and other smart people from providing improved replacements.

Yes. Now nvidia sucks even more.

Posted Nov 28, 2008 16:54 UTC (Fri) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

many people (including RMS) have said that they have no problem with sourceless firmware if it's in ROM, they only have a problem with sourceless firmware if it's in flash or loaded by the driver.