Re: Firmware - what are we going to do about it?
> On 26 Apr 2022, at 11:30, Ansgar <ansgar@43-1.org> wrote:
>
> On Tue, 2022-04-26 at 10:47 +0300, Hakan Bayındır wrote:
>> While I understand where you're coming from, I don't think such thing
>> is necessary, because a) Most popular devices with non-free firmware
>> blobs already work without such firmware
>
> No, they do not. Most popular devices won't work at all without non-
> free firmware, including boring things such as mass storage (SD cards,
> SSD, HDD, ..., and controllers), input devices (keyboards, mice, ...).
Yeah, you’re right. Since the firmware images always there and doesn’t need to be hot-loaded by the driver itself 99% of the time (for these classes of devices), I tend to forget about them.
I wonder whether these “proper” firmware can be considered as part of the hardware, since it’s bundled with the hardware, but not with the driver itself. This makes matters more complicated, of course, but starting somewhere may create the same wedging effect as in the drivers, over time.
>
>> , albeit with a lower performance
>> (e.g. Realtek NICs), and b) The drivers gracefully handle the lack of
>> firmware already, with a couple of harmless "ERROR:" messages.
>
> I would assume such NICs actually come with preinstalled non-free
> firmware which just has less functionality...
I generally envision them as an old school hardware with some ARM cores attached, and the functionality is disabled since you don’t fire up the ARM core with the proper so-called “program”.
>
> I get the impression you pretend that preinstalled non-free firmware
> just doesn't exist.
Ah no, it’s a honest brain-short. Since I exposed to a lot of hardware over the decades, my brain tends to categorize resident, non-updatable firmware as part of the hardware itself, since you have no access to it as you don’t have access to the silicon.
Sorry for the unintentional misunderstanding and possible tension.
Cheers,
H.
> Ansgar
>
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