Re: Firmware - what are we going to do about it?
Paul Wise wrote:
>
>On Tue, 2022-04-19 at 01:27 +0100, Steve McIntyre wrote:
>
>> There are a number of issues here that make developers and users unhappy:
>
>There are a couple more issues related to unredistributable firmware:
Oh, I'm quite sure there are more than that even! :-)
>Some firmware is only available in the operating system preinstalled on
>the device and needs to be manually extracted before d-i is run,
>potentially even only from processes running on the preinstalled
>operating system in cases where the storage must be wiped (such as
>Android devices) before an alternative OS like Debian can be installed.
>IIRC there is some laptop WiFi firmware that is like this.
Yup.
>Some firmware is not redistributable and is only available in
>proprietary drivers on websites and is hard to extract from those
>drivers. IIRC some of the proprietary nvidia firmware for use by the
>libre nouveau GPU driver is like this, both signed firmware for very
>new nvidia hardware and unsigned firmware for very old nvidia hardware,
>although the firmware for the old nvidia hardware has libre firmware in
>nouveau, but the libre firmware is/was buggier than the proprietary
>firmware. The tools for extracting the old firmware aren't in Debian.
Yup.
I don't see us fixing *all* of these issues any time soon. But in
those cases where we *can* redistribute firmware we can make things
easier for users who need it.
And *then* we can explain to them why the non-free firmware is bad for
their freedom, with examples of what they can do to improve things.
--
Steve McIntyre, Cambridge, UK. steve@einval.com
"We're the technical experts. We were hired so that management could
ignore our recommendations and tell us how to do our jobs." -- Mike Andrews
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