Debian 6.0 To Feature a Completely Free Kernel

dkd903 writes "The Debian Project has announced that the upcoming release — Debian 6.0 'Squeeze' — will have a completely free Linux kernel. This means that the Linux kernel which ships with Debian 6.0 will not have any non-free firmware. The Debian Project has been working on removing the non-free parts since the last two releases. With Squeeze, they are finally realizing that goal."

Comments

From Debian

[icebraining]

The link to Debian's actual announcement: http://www.debian.org/News/2010/20101215

Re:Nvidia

[JonJ]

Your post isn't even remotely relevant to the topic. Debian never has, and never will, ship binary nvidia drivers, these need to be installed after your base system is up and running and you've turned on the non-free repository. Basic display drivers or nouveau will work without closed source firmware.

Re:Will kill the project

[Beelzebud]

From the Debian site:

"In accordance with the Debian Social Contract, we acknowledge that some users require the use of works that do not conform to the DFSG and that those works might include non-free firmware bits. For the time being, we have added to the "non-free" area of our archives alternative installation images and additional packages for Debian Squeeze, that include non-free firmware bits needed to enable specific pieces of hardware. They are not part of Debian, they should be looked for explicitly by interested users, and we cannot support them to the same extent of Free firmware as we do not have access to the corresponding source code. We encourage hardware manufacturers to release only DFSG-free firmware and we cannot accept other kind of firmware as part of Debian."

The sky is, in fact, not falling...

Thanks to Alexandre Oliva of Linux-libre

[ciaran_o_riordan]

This is the result of a few years of work by Alexandre Oliva (FSFLA), who worked on the Linux-libre project and travelled to give presentations about the amount of non-free software in the default Linux kernel.

http://www.lsd.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
http://www.fsfla.org/svnwiki/selibre/linux-libre/

(it's also generally thanks to the gNewSense guys, Paul O'Malley & Brian Brazil in Ireland, who worked on the general issue of non-free software in distros, but the specific work on the kernel was championed by Alexandre.)

Re:Which will essentially cause nothing more than.

[Kjella]

They gave us the microcode, but not the source used to compile the microcode. It's basically a blob that runs on the GPU parsing command packets and executing them. So while they've documented the command packets, there's another level of code between it and the hardware. Exactly like how CPUs have microcode to execute x86/x86_64 commands, the only difference is that on GPUs they're loaded after the system is booted by the driver. It doesn't really make the GPU closed source any more than Intel or AMD are closed source CPUs, but if you want to get really formal about it you are distributing a non-free piece of software.

Re:Completely free kernel?

[Anonymous Coward]

http://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/History

"At this point, I concluded I would have to write a new
compiler from scratch. That new compiler is now known as GCC; none of the
Pastel compiler is used in it, but I managed to adapt and use the C front
end that I had written."