Re: Bug#594940: Includes binary-only and obfuscated C code
For the remainder of the files, whilst we may consider granting a
squeeze-ignore tag, we would like to come to an agreement as to how we
can resolve these issues in the medium term. We appreciate that the BSD
kernel has not received the same level of upstream attention that the
Linux kernel has in recent years in terms of ensuring that all content
is freely distributable. We believe that working with them on these
issues can only be of benefit for free software, and would help to move
the kfreebsd-* architectures from "technology previews" towards fully
supported stable releases with everything we have to come to expect from
the Linux architectures.
Does the kfreebsd kernel include the ability to load firmware from
external files, akin to /lib/firmware on Linux? If so, this would
hopefully make the process of moving the firmware files out-of-kernel
much less painful, particularly for those cases where firmware-non-free
already includes the affected files.
Currently, there exists a related kernel interface for it.
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=firmware:
"FIRMWARE LOADING MECHANISMS
Any component of the system can register firmware
images at any time by simply calling firmware_register().
This is typically done when a module containing a firmware image is
given control, whether compiled in, or preloaded by /boot/loader, or
manually loaded with kldload(8). However, a system can implement
additional mechanisms to bring these images in memory before calling
firmware_register().
When firmware_get() does not find the requested image, it tries to load
it using one of the available loading mechanisms. At the moment,
there is only one, namely Loadable kernel modules."
We could probably extend it. But definitely not in time for squeeze.
Now we have to somehow prune current source tree and disable some
modules. Could we get squeeze-ignore tag for some of the affected
files or is it necessary to prune all affected files ?
Cheers
Petr
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