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Shuttleworth Wants To Get Rid of Proprietary Firmware

Posted by samzenpus on from the change-your-ways dept.

jones_supa writes "In a new blog post, the Ubuntu main man Mark Shuttleworth calls for an end to proprietary firmwares such as ACPI. His reasoning is that running any firmware code on your phone, tablet, PC, TV, wifi router, washing machine, server, or the server running the cloud your SAAS app is running on, is a threat vector against you, and NSA's best friend. 'Arguing for ACPI on your next-generation device is arguing for a trojan horse of monumental proportions to be installed in your living room and in your data center. I've been to Troy, there is not much left.' As better solutions, Shuttleworth suggests delivering your innovative code directly to the upstream kernel, or using declarative firmware that describes hardware linkages and dependencies but doesn't include executable code."

3 of 147 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Precisely how... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Firmware is just fine, as long as it's non-proprietary--free as in freedom.

  2. Re:Precisely how... by amorsen · · Score: 4, Informative

    Precisely how does he intend that a machine boot to the install media without executable firmware?

    He does not complain about executable, he complains about proprietary.

    Besides, ACPI is complete overkill for booting.

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  3. Some context from a hardware perspective. by queazocotal · · Score: 5, Informative

    Great - you don't want ACPI.

    I'm looking at my Nokia n900 phone.
    (merely because I happen to have a detailed understanding of the design).

    Inside it, there are the following closed-source blobs running on turing complete processors.

    LED controller firmware.
    SIM java virtual machine
    SIM raw firmware.
    eMMC controller.
    SD controller.
    Hard-real-time modem controller.
    Modem high-level engine.
    Bluetooth CPU.
    Wifi processor.
    Main linux application processor
    GPU.
    I strongly suspect there is also an embedded processor in:
    Power managment controller.
    LCD.
    Battery charge monitor.
    GPS. (It's possible this is just an application running on the closed-source modem high level engine).

    https://srlabs.de/rooting-sim-...
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v... (rooting SD cards)
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v... (battery firmware hacking)
    Similar efforts have been done with reverse engineering the firmware of bluetooth devices, wifi.
    The notion that you should only care about the code running on the CPU being open has always seemed really naive to me.