Re: Bug#239952: kernel-source-2.6.4: qla2xxx contains non-free firmware
On Thu, Mar 25, 2004 at 05:21:44PM +0100, Marco d'Itri wrote:
> Refusing to distribute firmware files is just hypocrisy, because
> everyone of us has some non-free firmware in his own computer.
>
> I also oppose this on practical grounds, more and more essential
> hardware wants its firmware to be loaded by the host CPU (because it's
> the right thing to do when designing hardware, if it's not needed for
> boot the the flash RAM on the device is wasted).
>
> qla2xxx is not the only driver in debian which contains a firmware, BTW.
Yep. Many of the drivers in drivers/media/dvb/frontends also require
firmware. Some included it in the driver (big hex tables) and some like
to load it from the filesystem (including some from Windows DLLs).
I think the DFSG technically requires us to have source for that firmware.
We all know it is really compiled from source code originally in almost
all cases. However, removing those drivers from the kernel packages in
main would make them almost useless, imho.
Some of the removals are already very frustrating to me. acenic is gone
(its firmware was in the source). I notice that upstream linux 2.6.4
contains a rewrite of the e100 driver that no longer loads binary-only
firmware over the firmware built-in to the hardware, but the binary-only
firmware did have a performance advantage over the built-in firmware
which is presumably now lost.
Perhaps we need a set of complete kernel packages in non-free then.
Hamish
--
Hamish Moffatt VK3SB <hamish@debian.org> <hamish@cloud.net.au>
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