Debian to vote on its firmware path

Posted Sep 7, 2022 6:37 UTC (Wed) by IanKelling (subscriber, #89418)
In reply to: Debian to vote on its firmware path by mjg59
Parent article: Debian to vote on its firmware path

Free microcode updates would be good. Yes, most people are probably better off from a software freedom perspective with cpus that have no microcode at all. Afaik, those have historically had less security flaws too. But there are some freedom related reasons a person could be an exception. I started to write them down, but it got a bit long and I need to stop. I'll try to finish in the next week and post.

Debian to vote on its firmware path

Posted Sep 8, 2022 2:35 UTC (Thu) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]

There has been research into modifying CPU microcode that might eventually allow free microcode:

https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity17/techni...
https://github.com/RUB-SysSec/Microcode

It is very likely that the CPUs don't have enough storage to update *all* of the non-free microcode in ROM, but patching a small part of it might be doable. This is definitely the case for other "free" firmware too, some of the WiFi/GSM firmware is like that.