GNU Linux-libre 5.3 Continues Deblobbing & Dealing With Firmware Trickery

Hot off last night's Linux 5.3 release, the GNU folks have this morning released GNU Linux-libre 5.3-gnu as their downstream flavor of the kernel that strips out support for loading proprietary kernel modules and the ability to load binary-only microcode/firmware files, among other steps for aiming at a pure free software kernel.

With the GNU Linux-libre 5.3-gnu kernel, they've continued re-basing their existing de-blobbing patches as well as having to make some new adjustments and disabling the blob loading for QCOM, DRM driver HDCP support, Allegro-DVT, and Meson VDEC.

GNU FSF LA's Alexandre Oliva also expressed some criticism towards the Meson video decode work. Oliva noted, "the firmware sources were supposed to be available from LibreELEC, and though the link to the alleged sources there is broken, I managed to find the "source" repo containing them, only to find out the "source" was just a binary blob encoded in C as an array of char, just like Linux used to do back when I got involved with Linux-libre. Oh well... Request disabled..."

More details on this sanitized version of the Linux kernel via GNU.org.