GNU Linux-Libre 5.12 Released After More Driver Deblobbing, Dedicated To A Cat

[blackiwid]

It still blows my mind that people like you are using PCs and gadgets in the first place. Among other things you run UEFI, disk (SSD/HDD), CPU, NIC/WiFi, GPU and in many case sound card firmware

The problem with on runtime loadable firmwares is that they are a moving target, so it's better to have a black box that you can over time know all the quirks and to build around, but you can't build good software around a moving target.

Now you could argue you have always the freedom to load a older version of the firmware, but A are their contribution sometimes limited but also B like with I think the PS4 or was it the xbox where if you loaded a newer firmware and some transistor or something burned through that made it impossible to downgrade the firmware again, and this firmware was not manually installed like you would flash a bios, so it happend semi automatically. And it took features away from the hardware, so the user got taken away freedom by it, it's not always the backdoors freedom is more than just security from backdoors.

Just googled it, just find that you can't downgrade the firmware ever... which is bad enough, but there was this firmware that removed that jailbreak, so made the device less useful.

Also yes UEFI is evil, especially the secure boot bullshit and not only spy services and the manufactor have the rootkit but all criminals can use the bugs in it to hack pcs, yes the long run idea is to replace it, even if that means to move on to SPARC or something in the long run.

But firmware is not = firmware a cpu firmware as far as I know is technicaly impossible to write a backdoor with network access in it, no matter what you do. I am no expert in this microcode things but that is my understanding.

The question is do the 4 freedoms get restricted, if we consider bioses and stuff like that as hardware that is basically not really changable, at least we don't have to then it should not restrict the freedoms of any software run on it, with firmwares.

It seems that firmwares get upgraded automatically in ps4 in some you can opt out easily in some you have to mess with dns entries to stop it:

https://www.smartgametech.com/block-ps4-update-automatic/

It's really great you're not running or touching any IC business. Without firmware many devices would have to be recalled regularly due to design errors. That would cost a fortune and push you out of the market.

Not true most hardware runs fine without firmware upgrades it just ads new features and stuff, if the software is not banana software this basic hardware level firmwares should be fine enough, and nobody has a problem with the user deciding to actively upgrade their firmware. But the problem with this dynamically loaded firmwares is that companies can restrict the distribution of those and can as example enforce operation systems to only deliver the latest one or do other bad things.

It's just basic things, companies could implement all they implement in such firmwares with FPGAs.

Lastly, I'm 1000000% sure you have not actually verified the code you're running on any of your "open" "source" devices which means you're showing off and nothing else. .

That's no good argument, that is a binary argument, either you reach perfection and it's only focused on security and backdoors, freedom is more than backdoors, I think it's reasonable to say that the chance that 1000 different eyes from different institutions look over the source and they all conspire without nobody randomly looking over a certain peace of malicious code is very slim, but even if that would not be true, again the freedoms the GPL gives are more than just security. It allows every person on the planet to change software or hire somebody to change it, no MS or anything else can tell the person "no matter what you pay, we will not fullfil your request, because we want this antifeature in place".

So how does this automatic firmwares hurt the freedom of driver developers and users? Well the firmware upgrades can break the driver and then because it's a blackbox you have a very hard time to fix it, while one fix would been not to upgrade it, the damage of a upgrade can be higher than the benefit.

Of course that is not perfect, it would be better to get more, but it's a good compromise to limit the negative consequences, it would be nice to be able to hack on the firmware, too. And it would be great if we could hack the hardware to be better, too. But the real world has limitations always, we are not god and can't mold our cpus to become 10 times faster or something, but we can expect that the hardware we buy don't get regressions by forced / automatic firmware upgrades.

[birdie]

It still blows my mind that the "standard" linux kernel is shipped with so many black boxes and it blows it further that most of the people just see it normal or acceptable.

It still blows my mind that people like you are using PCs and gadgets in the first place. Among other things you run UEFI, disk (SSD/HDD), CPU, NIC/WiFi, GPU and in many case sound card firmware - and that's only what I know (gadgets have a whole lot more firmware). How do you sleep at night? Must be having nightmares daily due to the abundance of surveillance, backdoors and radio waves around.

It's really great you're not running or touching any IC business. Without firmware many devices would have to be recalled regularly due to design errors. That would cost a fortune and push you out of the market.

Lastly, I'm 1000000% sure you have not actually verified the code you're running on any of your "open" "source" devices which means you're showing off and nothing else. It's not humanly possible during one person's entire life to complete the formal verification of even a web browser you're using right now. Firefox for instance a year ago contained over 20 million lines of code.

(Someone continues to delete my comments for no reasons).

[mrazster]

What grinds my gears is a lack of lubrication.

+10
Dude you just made my day...thnx for that !

[stormcrow]

What grinds my gears is a lack of lubrication.

[Alexmitter]

It still blows my mind that the "standard" linux kernel is shipped with so many black boxes and it blows it further that most of the people just see it normal or acceptable.

The Linux kernel itself does not come with such. It comes with code that helps load a binary blob firmware on a hardware device depending on the driver.
Lets say a GPU, those often contain multiple controllers/CPUs doing various things, usually very special realtime OS', those come in the GPU firmware files.

Linux-libre strips out the code that loads such firmware onto the hardware, thats all. Its of course a whole 'nother rabbit hole in regards to such hardware that requires firmware loaded from the main CPU onto it at boot, I personally do not see that as a conflict in terms of free software because that is hardware. Those hardware controller software can and should be free software, but then it would still have no business in the kernel and be still shipped as a binary file in the linux-firmware repo because such specialized hardware needs specific compilation enviroments.

The nearest thing to a blob Linux had in its code since I remember is that Intel iGPU workaround were Intel wrote out a binary in hexadecimal in a variable inside the drivers header file, it was removed and replaced by a different readable code solution on the ask of the linux-libre guys.

What Linux-libre does well is to show how much stuff works without loading binary firmware into the hardware at all, quite a lot actually.

[coder]

To me, this post highlights how useless the FSF and their ilk has become,

To me, you anti-GPL types are just as extremist as the FSF.

GPL has a place in the world. It's not the right license for all or maybe even most software, but the unparalleled success of the Linux kernel and GNU tools stands as a testament to its potential.

[andyprough]

Saving 60mb of space by going with the Linux-libre kernel today - about 1/5 the size of the kernel.

[alcalde]

What grinds my gears is when people who claim to be "free software advocates" are the ones who don't care about this.

There's nothing to care about. No one's sharing low-level driver code; it's not a spreadsheet. This is one step from Stallman not viewing web pages because the javascript being served to the browser isn't licensed under GNU.

I remember one of the "libre" distros having an argument on their message board a long time ago, upset that one of its advocates got the Linux Action Show to review their distro. Some of the core contributors opined that LAS would be more concerned about whether flash worked or they could play their audio/video files or their WiFi worked than whether it was "libre". They named other shows they wished the person had scored a review with instead because those hosts allowed them to "change the subject" and talk about the license rather than the capabilities of the distro.

To me, this post highlights how useless the FSF and their ilk has become, to the point where their only "contributions" to the world of open source nowadays are keeping Richard Stallman employed and removing features from software. I expected to find people laughing about them and weirdly there are people here praising the crippling of software and hence the adoption of desktop Linux. You're working against the adoption of free software with this crippling nonsense. Stallman is the living embodiment of "the perfect being the enemy of the good".

Oh, I forgot the final "contribution": they make a list of software that they believe needs an open source equivalent. That's it; they don't actually write any of this software or contribute any money to hire programmers to write said software; they just make a list. Ridiculous.

https://www.fsf.org/campaigns/priority-projects/

[alcalde]

It still blows my mind that the "standard" linux kernel is shipped with so many black boxes and it blows it further that most of the people just see it normal or acceptable.

It blows my mind that Richard Stallman started a cult that believes that crippling your software is somehow beneficial. I know he has problems, but how does that explain everyone else?

[PublicNuisance]

It still blows my mind that the "standard" linux kernel is shipped with so many black boxes and it blows it further that most of the people just see it normal or acceptable.

What grinds my gears is when people who claim to be "free software advocates" are the ones who don't care about this.