Re: Thinking about a "jessie and a half" release
Henrique de Moraes Holschuh writes ("Re: Thinking about a "jessie and a half" release"):
> And so are the microcode packages, which are absolutely required for
> stable operation of at least Skylake and Broadwell right now (or your
> data is toast due to TSX malfunction or one of the multiple undefined
> behavior errata).
>
> One or two Skylake motherboards have good enough UEFI updates available,
> but that's like 1% of them. This should get better in time, of course...
> If people would update their firmware frequently in the first place.
Of course a Debian user who has such a BIOS, that updates the
microcode for them, is in no better position (from a software freedom
point of view) than a Debian user who enables non-free to get the
microcode from Debian. Arguably in many respects they are in a worse
position.
If there is a *practical* benefit to Debian being awkward about
non-free microcode, it lies in being sure that users know what's going
on, discouraging users from buying such hardware in the first place
and perhaps in encourating better behaviour by manufacturers.
Of course it also allows Debian proper to carry on without tainting
its hands with this non-free stuff. I'm sure that this would make a
lovely case study for a philosophy essay but -devel probably isn't a
good venue for that.
In the meantime I wanted to thank those who are indeed sullying their
hands to try to help users make their machines reliable.
Thanks,
Ian.
--
Ian Jackson <ijackson@chiark.greenend.org.uk> These opinions are my own.
If I emailed you from an address @fyvzl.net or @evade.org.uk, that is
a private address which bypasses my fierce spamfilter.
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