On 9/11/22 19:41, Steve McIntyre wrote:
To me, this is an important part of the situation we find ourselves in. It seems that there is a trend where "firmware" is moving away from "ROM" (generally writable flash) into RAM. That is, in years past, the firmware came preloaded on the device, but now the driver pushes it at boot.As far as many vendors are concerned, the firmware blobs are basically part of the hardware. They're just provided in a cheaper, more flexible way - loading things at runtime.
This has certainly drawn our attention to the non-free bits. But shipping the non-free blobs and loading them at run-time results in exactly the same free and non-free bits being executed as the old model.
While I would very much prefer free firmware (and I applaud those making free replacements), my view is that moving non-free bits from "ROM" to installer media (and installed system) does not make the problem worse. In contrast, NOT putting the blobs on the installer media has the obvious downside of hardware not working.
-- Richard
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