GNU Linux-Libre 4.10: GPU Drivers Remain The Most Frequent Offenders

[ghibli]

Hello, this is the place to balme about the people that made gnu-linux the best software ever done by humanity? I only read fucking bastards that should use windows and let linux for the "nazis of gnu", you can install windows, all the games will work, is full of blobs... but the soul of gnu-linux is no blobs, i don't want another windows for geeks, i want a option to a blob full of backdoors world...

[Zucca]

Basically Linux libre would work fine with newer hardware if the binary blobs were on a flash chip on the hardware... So then the blob would be a part of the hardware itself.
It's a fuzzy line.

But looking this from the opposite angle: SSD drives, for example, have firmwares embeded into them for the flash controller. I wonder how far back time you'd need to go to be able to build and run a totally blob free PC+OS...
I remember that earlier hard drives didn't have but few semiconductors. The PC had software that controlled the movement of the head and platter spin motor (+ everything else that is needed for a hard drive to have basic functionality). That would certainly meet also the blob free hardware requirement. :P But when was that? in 80's? even 70's?

[arteast]

It is not possible to use e.g. recent NVidia cards without signed firmware blobs; how is it drivers' fault? They should harass NVidia, Intel, AMD, whoever, instead of pointing their fingers to drivers.

[discordian]

Kinda pointless to complain about firmware, just as Zucca said. GPUs are a Blackbox anyway. Whether another piece of the blackbox sits on your harddrive, resides on a flash/eeprom, or is etched into the rest of the GPU doesnt matter.
Seems like with a filename its suddenly an offense =9

[arteast]

The Linux-libre folks continue to criticize the open-source GPU DRM drivers as being offenders for using binary blob firmware/microcode

I've just read actual announcement email and it didn't strike me as a criticism towards GPU drivers. They did use the word "offender" but I don't felt any negative connotations towards the drivers or their authors. So I have to take back my previous post.

[mulenmar]

If we could harness "missing the point of a project" to produce electricity, Gentoo users wouldn't need to pay power bills from their compilations for a good twenty years. :P

1) It's not "fascist" to want to have the option to not be forced to live with insecure, unverifiable code. It's quite the opposite, in fact, as it's in opposition to the centralized, autocratic control of one's computer system by an outside party (the company releasing the blob, which only works for one or a few versions of surrounding software...thus further controlling the system).

Moreover, only releasing a precompiled blob, without the source code available and without releasing sufficient/any hardware specs necessary to implement a free-software alternative, is a very effective "forcible suppression of opposition" (to use part of the Merriam-Webster definition).

2) If you don't want to use linux-libre, here's an idea -- and I suggest you sit down for this one: Then don't use it. Le gasp! It's not like you're prohibited from continuing to use the pre-blob-defenestration, mainline version.'

Edit for less ambiguity: While I'm somewhat concerned about microcode as well, I don't have as certain an understanding about exactly how it works and, particularly, whether doing malicious things with it is practical. I'm referring, above, more to the blob-loading drivers that run on the CPU.

[bridgman]

1) It's not "fascist" to want to have the option to not be forced to live with insecure, unverifiable code. It's quite the opposite, in fact, as it's in opposition to the centralized, autocratic control of one's computer system by an outside party (the company releasing the blob, which only works for one or a few versions of surrounding software...thus further controlling the system).

Moreover, only releasing a precompiled blob, without the source code available and without releasing sufficient/any hardware specs necessary to implement a free-software alternative, is a very effective "forcible suppression of opposition" (to use part of the Merriam-Webster definition).

You seem to be mixing two different things here - HW microcode (part of the HW design, loaded into or burned into the device) and binary-only driver code (running on the CPU).

HW microcode really is part of the HW, and is required in order for HW to provide the functionality described in the HW specs. Opening that up also requires opening up a fair amount of the chip's internal design rather than just the information required to write an open source driver.

[mulenmar]

You seem to be mixing two different things here - HW microcode (part of the HW design, loaded into or burned into the device) and binary-only driver code (running on the CPU).

HW microcode really is part of the HW, and is required in order for HW to provide the functionality described in the HW specs. Opening that up also requires opening up a fair amount of the chip's internal design rather than just the information required to write an open source driver.

Open hardware designs would be preferable anyway, from the standpoint of producing safe, secure designs.

And yeah, I suppose I was a bit ambiguous there. I'm mostly concerned about the driver code being open and comprehensible. Being able to check the microcode and be sure no funny business of malicious instruction-modification or information leakage/transmission is important too, but I don't trust my understanding of that sub-topic enough to make as big a fuss over it.

[bridgman]

Open hardware designs would be preferable anyway, from the standpoint of producing safe, secure designs.

Yep, although it's hard to make the business model work unless you are piggybacking on an existing hardware design that someone else already paid for. You also don't know if the chip you buy is actually as "pure" as you think unless you inspect every step of the way including back-auditing masks to logic design.

[cj.wijtmans]

GPU drivers are most frequent offenders even without that blob firmwares question

GPU drivers produces most of the people noise about any OS anyway

this is why descrete GPU driversshould be in userspace.