Re: About the current binary firmware drivers situation
On Thu, Mar 10, 2005 at 11:10:56PM +0100, Frederik Schueler wrote:
> Hello,
>
> The general resolutions 2004-003 and 2004-004 in mind, I would like to
> find a consensus among the kernel-team members on how to deal with
> binary-only firmware blobs in the kernel, now for sarge, and for later
> releases.
>
> Bugs like #298743 show we have users needing the currently pruned
> drivers, and I need some of them too myself - both for my private boxes,
> as well as at my workplace. Having the drivers removed without a
> replacement in non-free, like for example custom buildable module
> packages and udebs to be loaded at installation time, is a not tolerable
> situation.
>
> If you have a closer look at the kernel-sources we distribute, only a
> few binary firmware drivers are removed at all. The dri modules for
> radeon and mga, the advansys scsi driver, soundblaster 16 and many more
> drivers with binary firmware are still in place. Even questionable
> examples like the intel e100 driver, which applies a small (binary)
> patch to the firmware at initialization time.
>
> In my opinion, this situation is discriminatory against users who want
> to run Debian on a system containing affected hardware.
>
>
> In short, I would like to propose the following:
>
> 1. we remove the pruning from current sarge kernels, and release kernel
> sources complete with all drivers as distributed on kernel.org
>
> 2. we agree on how to handle binary firmware in future releases,
> in the light of GR 2004-004:
Notice that invoking 2004-004 is problematic, since it only overrides the
cleanup-solution of 2004-03, which applies to non-software in the old
interpretation.
I don't think you can argue that these firmware blobs are not software though,
altough the fact that the 2004-03 GR that 2004-04 overrides is about
'editorial changes' may let us some options to slit in stuff under cover of
service to the users.
In any case i think that keeping mutilated drivers in main is a problem, and
is going to cause us support nightmares in the long run, so i would rather we
don't build those in main at all.
Friendly,
Sven Luther
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