Bug#494308: Living without e100 firmware
I thought it might be useful to point out that the removal of the
non-Free firmware present in the e100 driver doesn't have any effect
on the (old) notebook I have that uses the e100 driver. Initially,
when I first converted it to linux-libre, that didn't include that
driver at all, enabling the eepro100 driver was enough to get it to
work. Later on, linux-libre started replacing the blob with
/*(DEBLOBBED)*/, making for an empty array of firmware code, and this
cleaned-up e100 module worked just fine.
So don't assume that the removal of the firmware will have a negative
impact on all e100-using hardware. If my experience counts, it will
have zero impact. That said, I assume the firmware must be there for
some reason, even if it's just to update in-flash firmware or so.
Perhaps I just don't have hardware that depends on it. Who knows?
--
Alexandre Oliva http://www.lsd.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
Free Software Evangelist oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org}
FSFLA Board Member ¡Sé Libre! => http://www.fsfla.org/
Red Hat Compiler Engineer aoliva@{redhat.com, gcc.gnu.org}
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