GNU's Linux-Libre 3.15 Kernel Released

[Britoid]

With something customisable, like a traditional desktop PC, you can probably put together hardware that does everything you want without any non-free drivers or firmware. And then your system is probably a lot more stable because the free drivers are much more open to development. Although, you wouldn't need the libre kernel on it, because a generic distro-provided one shouldn't need to load any non-free driver modules or firmware.

That's fine if you don't know the definition of FPS or Wi-Fi.

The only person this project benefits is Richard Stallman. The developers running the project could put their time into something more productive.

[stevenc]

I can't understand why anyone uses this. Who'd want a computer where they can't use half of the hardware.

With something customisable, like a traditional desktop PC, you can probably put together hardware that does everything you want without any non-free drivers or firmware. And then your system is probably a lot more stable because the free drivers are much more open to development. Although, you wouldn't need the libre kernel on it, because a generic distro-provided one shouldn't need to load any non-free driver modules or firmware.

Didn't they remove the ability to load blobs? If so, so called "libre" freedom.

Yes, they're taking away that particular freedom from users. Yes that's irony.

[Britoid]

Yay.......???

I can't understand why anyone uses this. Who'd want a computer where they can't use half of the hardware.


Didn't they remove the ability to load blobs? If so, so called "libre" freedom.

[Adarion]

Well, I guess this is more than the "deblob" use flag from Gentoo. Free as in freedom is always good, sure, but I wonder what the point here is.
Effectively you might be crippling the kernel to run the hardware in a user's system. Sure, a free firmware implementation would be great, but if that is not yet available one might go with a few microblobs (e.g. like radeon UVD firmware). This seems to me still better than having e.g. no wlan, no proper energy management and so on. There is hardware that just comes with stupid broadcom chips built in a not everybody can buy a better (more free) chip anywhere and exchange it in the laptop. Some things might even be soldered.
So what is the point? Harassing users?

Instead of crippling the kernel these guys should maybe try to reverse engineer or scratch-build a free firmware for the affected chips. (Of course that is much more work but would help the overall situation better.)

I personally try to avoid hardware that needs unfree software to run but to a certain extent it is impossible to do so.
Also: look at coreboot reality. How many laptops, mainboards etc. are there? And on how many percent of them can you be sure to run coreboot? (hint: ain't much, sadly) Often most things are supported but then there is one central element blocking everything else (Hello SuperIO chips!). So sometimes we have to bear the proprietary firmware, even though it is ugly as hell (UEFI) to be able to run the computer at all in the first place.

[phoronix]

Phoronix: GNU's Linux-Libre 3.15 Kernel Released

Coming just hours after the release of Linux 3.15, the GNU fans have put out their updated Linux-Libre kernel modification...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTcxNDg